I Worked at Arcadia in the Golden Days and Amazon’s Culture Will Kill the Business
Why is it that dictators believe the rules don’t apply to them and history doesn’t repeat itself?
Amazon’s latest PR move of aggressive honesty, apparently from Bezos himself is no less frightening than when Amazon pretended they were a good employer whilst staff spoke of not drinking water so they didn’t have to visit the bathroom. It’s just now the maggots churning away at the heart of Amazon are in full view. The monster has revealed itself in all its full glory.
If Amazon was a guy I was dating, everyone would be telling me I was crazy to still be with him. You need to get away from Amazon. He’s a good-for-nothing piece of s**t.
We should all be running a mile from Amazon. Amazon has no respect for any stakeholder of the business.
And like it or not, we are all stakeholders of Amazon. We have all purchased goods from them. Maybe some of us still do. I haven’t succumbed to an Alexa, but I can’t blame anyone for purchasing one when Amazon sells them at a loss to prevent competition from entering the voice-activated market.
But this article is not about why you shouldn’t give your money to a company that grossly mistreats their staff by putting them in poverty, damaging them physically or psychologically, or making them shit into bags and then humiliating them for doing so. No, this article is about why I believe Amazon will ultimately die as a result of this style of management.
Perhaps you’re shaking your head at this point. You’re thinking, there is no way that Amazon could go under, they are unstoppable and also the biggest retailer in the world.
Let me explain the problems that I foresee in Amazon’s internal and external environment that will f**k this company up. As part of my analysis, I’m going to draw on my personal experience of working for Phillip Green and his once all-powerful London-based Arcadia brand.
Non-inclusive ‘we are the best’ culture
Arcadia was an angry place to work, spitting with judgment and a breeding ground for bullies. Bullying, particularly of those who dared to be different was actively encouraged. I’m not surprised that this is reportedly the case at Amazon too. Those who don’t comply are disposed of.
The problem with dictatorship businesses is they think that they are the gods. There are in-jokes about the other businesses that keep on biting at their heels. People who leave to work in smaller businesses are laughed about, they just couldn’t cut it.
In this type of culture, diversity is not welcome. Either you live and breathe the brand or you don’t. Similar to being in a cult, you only spend time with people from the cult, consume what they do, dress the way they do, or else you are out. Of course, you must be willing to sacrifice your life aka weekends and evenings for no extra money and without a whiff of a complaint.
A non-inclusive culture is the death of a business. You need diversity. You need a multitude of opinions and perspectives to survive.
A command and control hierarchy does not generate respect or loyalty
Philip Green would wait at the office entrance on a morning, barking at staff what floor you going to? If you were going above the third floor you could take the elevator, otherwise, he would humiliate you if you didn’t want to walk.
Of course, this had nothing to do with queue reduction. It was a display of power, carefully orchestrated first thing in the morning to set the tone for the working day. Don’t forget who I am and that I can tell you what to do and you will do it.
Just because Bezos is not out there every day brazenly screaming at his employees, it’s reported he is more reserved. However, the tight no-room-to- breathe systems and the dystopian workplace environment void of any human emotion that he lovingly created instill exactly the same feeling in employees as Green’s authoritarian display of power.
A previous employee described Amazon as the place where grown men would sit and cry at their desks. It was not uncommon either to observe staff crying at Arcadia.
When the place stinks of fear, there’s no possibility for respect or loyalty. But this is not 1955, we all know that if you want to get the best out of people you need to be nice. Bezos knows this too but he doesn’t care. He’s given up pretending that he’s nice to people.
Why is this? Because he believes that money is more important than anything and people will f**k over their neighbors for a dollar, which is exactly what his business is based on. It’s not about getting the best out of people, it’s about giving people no other option but to work for or buy from Amazon. We are all worse off because of Amazon and it’s not going to get any better.
They think their USP cannot be replicated and customers will be forever loyal
Amazon’s unique selling point is its delivery network. Arcadia’s was fashion credentials. Arcadia’s style is much more difficult to replicate than a delivery network. But competitors still managed it. And they managed to do it better.
Unfortunately, a ‘we are the best’ culture does not permit a subjective examination of the business model. They chronically underestimate the threats that exist in their internal and external environment. Bezos and Green before him believe that customers are stupid and lazy. And that competitors will never be as successful as they are.
Bezos has so far tried to buy out competitors or annihilate them, see Zappos and any cloud storage firm. This was something that Green did too, see Etam, the viable business that Green bought then asset-stripped.
But there is only so long you can do this. See Green and Arcadia.
You think you already know everything there is to know about your customers
There is always more to learn about your market. But the problem with the big player is that they think they already know it all. After all, they are the biggest, they are the best. Customers will just flock to them because of that right?
Wrong. Customers aren’t stupid, and their loyalty can easily vanish in a poof of neon glitter as Philip Green eventually learned.
The focus on revenue over quality means customers know they are not getting a good deal. After paying good money and getting dog turd a couple of times, they will take their business elsewhere.
When the focus is predominantly on revenue and increasing like on like sales, the product and customer satisfaction is repeatedly sacrificed. Prices go up and quality reduces.
They underestimate the impact of their dubious ethics
This is part of believing we are the biggest and the best and thinking that nothing can change that. Both Green and Bezos are guilty of this. They think their USP and their all-powerful brand, will magic out the s**t stains from their behavior like Vanish.
But some stains don’t come out and everyone has a limit for s**t. What these dictators don’t get is that no one wants to drown in s**t, even their gold leaf prime next day delivery s**t.
Even before Green was called out in #Metoo whilst simultaneously managing to leave the majority of his staff without pensions and his suppliers without payment, he had to deal with a lot of bad press because he didn’t pay tax.
Of course, Amazon does this too. But Green was such a prominent champagne guzzler and celebrity luvvie, this looked particularly distasteful. Here he was, the dictionary definition of a fat cat, pretending that because his wife lay on a yacht in Monaco most of the year, this meant he didn’t have to pay tax.
This tax avoidance in 2010 was the beginning of the end for Green.
Reports about Amazon’s inhumane treatment of staff have been circling for a while, and this is turning customers away. Customers who don’t agree that delivery drivers now cannot feed their families or pay rent, customers who don’t want the long-term psychological impact on their communities that comes from prime next-day delivery.
Admitting that you buy from Amazon is slowly becoming as shameful as buying from slave labor. It takes time for the shit to stick but once it has, there’s no removing it, no matter how many charitable deeds you throw at it.
Treat your suppliers like s**t and it comes to bite you on the ass
If suppliers wanted to work with Arcadia they had to pay for manufacturing, shipment, and warehousing costs until we wanted the stock. Which would sometimes be a year past the original delivery date.
But of course, if suppliers delivered the stock even a day late it would be canceled or significantly reduced.
Payment terms were also extended with little notice, so suppliers would have to wait months to get paid if we ever actually took the stock.
It’s little wonder that many suppliers Arcadia worked with went under.
You might be thinking, how did Arcadia get away with this? Well because Arcadia, like Amazon is now, was all-powerful. The message to suppliers was, if you f**k with us, you will never work in this business again.
As suppliers are responsible for the most important aspect of your business, the product, by destroying that relationship you are jeopardizing the quality and availability of your product for the bottom line. It’s not a good long-term business model. If your suppliers don’t like you, they won’t be giving you their best.
I’m not surprised that Amazon also engages in similar tactics.
They have been reported to bully third-party sellers like Popsockets into selling at a reduced price, prevented sellers from accessing preferential delivery slots, and create unfair payment terms.
When everything is sacrificed for the bottom line, you will eventually sacrifice the business
You can’t disagree with a dictator and you can’t voice an opinion in a dictatorship
It was clear to many employees at Arcadia that changes were desperately needed. The website for instance was a hot mess and even then we were losing out to ASOS, a trend that was going to continue and ultimately be the demise of the business.
The potential of international sales was not capitalized on. We were told that the UK was our market and instead of tailoring stock packages by geographical region, we would just blanket send stock worldwide.
It’s well known that the little people that will see problems with the current business model. But if they are fearful that their criticism of the status quo will not only be ignored but may be considered unhelpful are they ever going to make those vital suggestions?
Now I know that Arcadia’s old school problems are not Amazon’s but there will be problems and because of their autocratic culture, there will be problems that the Amazon bigwigs don’t even know are festering away in the bowels of the pirate ship Amazon.
Workhouses don’t work
Working conditions at Arcadia were grim. Working there was like living in a pressure cooker. It was hot, uncomfortable and every second counted.
The offices were so ingrained in filth that no amount of cleaning made a difference. The computers so old they were museum pieces. When I left in 2010 an MS-DOS system was still used for forecasting sales. Seriously. Most people who had worked there a long time claimed that was why they started wearing spectacles.
One year, after the Christmas break, rats had taken over the office. Of course, nothing can stop the work so most of us sat cross-legged on our office chairs hoping the rats wouldn’t crawl up the chairs. Every couple of minutes a scream would break out as a rat made human contact.
Eventually, an email was sent out telling staff to stop screaming and if they really had to they could work from home. In a supplier meeting in the canteen later that week, I desperately hoped he didn’t see the rats weaving between the soup urns and stealing lettuce from the salad bar.
This was the impact of Green’s 1.2 billion pound payout in 2005. Instead of putting money back into the business where it was needed, he sat on his yacht whilst his workers fought with rats in the noughties equivalent of a London workhouse.
A grim working environment does not equal happy, relaxed, and creative employees. Businesses need creativity and innovation to survive.
You might have read all of this and still think this may be have been so for Arcadia, but Amazon is different.
However, this is exactly what everyone thought in 2005 when Green paid himself a record-breaking corporate payout of 1.2 billion pounds. No one blinked an eye. Because Arcadia was unstoppable. It didn’t matter how much he bled the place dry, Arcadia represented the British high street and its worldwide dominance seemed gold plated.
Things change, the world changes. And my bet is that Amazon’s disregard for anyone but itself and its bottom line will deliver it the same fate that Arcadia has experienced 15 years after Green’s historic payout.
Thank you for reading.
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