Back in the dark ages—1971—my junior high school announced a fundraising program for some worthy cause (Cheerleader uniforms? Football team trips? Whatever..) to be funded through a magazine subscription drive. For those readers under 40, these were very common events throughout the country. A company would make a presentation about how easy it was to sell subscriptions to about 100 different magazines, and based on a certain number of sales you’d receive a special prize, which ascended in value from a box of candy to a new Schwinn bicycle.
Nobody at our school got the bicycle, nor had anyone we knew from surrounding schools reached that Olympian height. After about a week, all my friends had had enough with neighbors who wouldn’t open doors (we were at that awkward age between being the cute Cub Scout with raffle sales and the attractive college guy with Compton’s Encyclopedia), relatives who had been saturated with their own kids’ fundraisers, and strangers at the supermarket who were still trying to digest the gross of Girl Scouts Thin Mints acquired a few months earlier. We knew someone got the Schwinn, perhaps in a galaxy far, far away. My father explained that we were working for chump prizes, the magazines were offered at give-away rates to build a subscription base, and that the only people who really made out were the subscription drive organizers.
I was reminded of this when I read the New York Times expose on Amazon and its corporate culture. People come for the bicycle, and they discover that almost everyone else barely gets the box of candy. Most people are toast in a highly toxic corporate culture that doesn’t respect personal time, human foibles, or collegiality (thanks to a secret review process that would have made Stalin blush). A few rare people survive to get the bicycle, and Bezos gets all the subscription money. If this is the future, I’d rather stay home with the latest issue of “Grit”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html
Happy Labor Day!
Jim Shulman
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