Letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
Subject: Where you ought to build your second headquarters
Hint: It’s not where you think
Dear Jeff:
It has come to my attention that you are looking for a place to build your new headquarters, and are currently considering all kinds of stinky, highly populated hellholes (aka cities) for a project that will cover several hundred acres and employ roughly 40,000 people.
Bad idea. Forget Chicago, Detroit, or St. Louis, and consider instead the advantages of building your second headquarters in a much more imaginative and unexpected place—namely, my backyard.
To be clear: I don’t mean somewhere near me, in the general vicinity of my home; I mean my actual backyard. There’s a good tenth of an acre back there, ample room for a decent-sized Quonset hut and a picnic table (for lunch breaks). I’m pretty sure I could have the new facility up and running in an afternoon. To sweeten the deal, I’d let Amazon piggy-back on my household wi-fi for free.
There are plenty of other reasons Amazon should consider building its headquarters in my backyard.
First, consider the savings. The only person you’d have to hire is me, saving you the combined salaries of 40,000 people. Plus, we could order the Quonset hut from Home Depot (through Amazon, of course), which would save you $1.5-2 billion, depending on how great a snack machine you’re willing to give me.
But that’s not all.
I know some folks who live in Seattle, and they say that having Amazon in their backyard has created a massive traffic headache and upset the whole balance of the community because you hire young people, work them too hard, and burn them out in a year. Boo hoo. By now it must be obvious to you that the so-called Millennial generation has no grit, and the generation after them—let’s call it the WTF?! Generation—is even worse. I, on the other hand, come from a generation of workers who know how to shut up and get the job done, even if we hate every goddamn minute of it. We’re accustomed to boring, thankless work in a dysfunctional bureaucracy, and expect our time at work to be a soul-sucking waste of whatever talent God gave us. Plus, I drive a mid-size sedan and live in the suburbs, so the impact on traffic of hiring me vs. 40,000 Millennials would be negligible.
But let’s get down to nuts and bolts. What other advantages are there to hiring me to run your headquarters in my backyard? I understand that millions of people order stuff from Amazon every day, and that fulfillment of these orders is a top priority. Currently, people expect to click on something and have it delivered to their doorstep in a day or two, and even an hour or two in some places. Even you must realize that this ever-accelerating pace of delivery can’t go on forever. For one thing, it’s causing an increasingly common malady known as “Amazon Fatigue.” Amazon Fatigue (AF) sets in when a person has bought every conceivable thing they can think of, and their house is full of crap that sounded like a good idea when it showed up on Groupon, but now not so much. In extreme cases, the clicking finger of an AF sufferer is reduced to a calloused lump of useless flesh that can no longer nudge a cursor toward the “add to cart” button, and spasms uncontrollably when asked to “check out,” particularly if there is some question about whether or not the shipping will be free.
If you hire me to run your headquarters out of my backyard, I can significantly slow the spread of AF by drastically lowering people’s expectations about how soon their order will arrive. To begin with, I don’t like to work more than twenty hours a week if I can help it, so there’d be a built-in limit on my productivity. I’m also fairly lazy, so if, say, someone ordered a book, it might take me a several weeks to get around to pulling it off the shelf and boxing it up—more if they want me to go through the hassle of gift-wrapping it. Likewise, if someone ordered a pair of shoes, it might take me months to get around to it, because frankly, shoes are not that important to me.
The upside of all this, for Amazon, is that a delivery delay of several months would open up opportunities for small business owners to fill the gap—by, say, opening stores that sell books and shoes to people who want their stuff more or less immediately. That way, people could get in their cars and go pick the items up themselves, saving you millions in inventory, storage, and shipping costs. You wouldn’t have to do anything but sit back and let the orders pile up. But here’s the best part: You wouldn’t even have to do that, because as the sole employee of your new Midwestern headquarters, I’d be doing it for you!
Mark my words: When you back off the whole manic delivery-at-your-doorstep-overnight thing, you’ll be hailed as a hero in the business community. By implementing my new “Delivery Maybe” policy, you’d spur the kind of economic development cities and towns all over the country are desperate for. People would love you. They’d shave their heads to be more like you. They’d name their kids something ironic with the letter “z” in it, like Zippy or Pizzazz, in honor of your visionary sluggishness. Best of all, you’d be sending an important message for future generations: that insanely fast delivery of all the heart’s desires is a recipe for despair, especially if you do it so often that your hand cramps into a gnarled ball of primordial pain.
So you may be wondering: How much are all of these fabulous benefits going to cost you?
Once the hut is up and running, not much. My salary is negotiable, but I’d prefer to be paid in the form of Whole Foods gift cards. That way I could at least afford to eat while I work for you, which would be a step up for me. Rabbits ate all the vegetables I planted in the backyard this spring (conveniently opening up space for your new headquarters), and since I lost my previous job two years ago, efforts to retrain me into a more socially useful profession (I used to be a journalist) have sadly and repeatedly failed.
Please consider my offer. By hiring me, you’d save yourself a lot of trouble, and you’d be hailed as a hero for saving capitalism from, well . . . you.###