Bezos Come Back

Since Jeff Bezos left his post as CEO of Amazon, in mid-2021, the stock is down 43%.

That’s 5 times worse than the average stock in the S&P 500. It’s more than twice as bad as Google. It’s as bad as the performance of Meta, the artists formerly known as Facebook.

Amazon is also shedding employees faster than Bed, Bath & Beyond. Some 27,000 have been let go this year alone. 

The job of running this company is simply too big for Andy Jassy.

The store is at war with itself, with third party sellers sabotaging Amazon’s own merchandising. The company’s physical retail effort has been a disaster. Walmart is beating it all to hell. The streaming unit is on an island. Jassy replaced himself with an outsider. Adam Selipsky had been at AWS 11 years but left to join Tableau Software and was recruited back by Jassy.

Morale at Amazon is at an all-time low. My own Amazon drivers used to be cheerful folks who looked forward to driving new electric vans. Now they’re in beat-up gas-powered garbage, they don’t say hello, sometimes they’re in personal cars, and one even blocked my driveway the other day. (I’m not going to report her. She was obviously overworked and under stress.)

The way back seems obvious to me. Put a merchandiser in charge of the store. Yes, maybe from Walmart. Make peace with the third party sellers. Give each division a visible head who will talk to the press and public about what’s new and exciting. Fix Alexa by making the technology open source and improving its AI. Make the Kindle more visible and make peace with the reading public that’s so sore at it they’re going back to physical books.

When I mention this online, however, I get strange pushback. Shh, I’m being told. AWS will be spun out and everyone will be happy again. Uh, why? Sure, the company may indeed be worth more than the sum of its parts, but the growth came about due to synergy, the store creating cash flow that let the cloud grow, the cloud making streaming’s resources free, Prime making the whole thing a bargain. Now they’re nickel and diming people to death. We have never used Audible, but we’re always charged for it, because they put the “buy Audible” button next to every book purchase, and won’t take any phone calls to cancel it.

Each mistake by itself doesn’t look like much. But great companies die slowly, slowly, then all at once. Amazon is vulnerable right now, to regulators, to Walmart, to its employees and customers.

Get off your yacht and fix it, Jeff, or your heirs may die broke.