When I worked there (more than a decade ago) senior leaders and old-timers were extremely proud of the fact that they did things like sending "your Prime membership will renew in (a month - I think) - be sure to cancel if you don't want it to" emails. This was quite different from typical subscription services providers at the time.
In fact, I had more than one old-timer mention that they would ask employment candidates about the Prime pricing and renewal strategy and that candidates who said something along the lines of "it's best for people to subscribe and then never use it so we make margin on the service revenue" (along the lines of gym business models) would be rejected.
They really wanted people to want to be Prime members (this was even before Bezos' famous "you'd be irresponsible not to be a Prime member" comment...)
Amazon started going downhill when they started losing their founding builders and started hiring cisco and other silicon valley insiders at executive levels. The Amazon Way is now a quaint retrospective, and the quality and attractiveness are quickly moving to the lowest common denominator.
That's impressive but man what an unfair hiring policy. A candidate is trying to guess corporate culture, makes the wrong guess, and then you reject them? It's a coin flip.
Isn't that most social culture? Expecting people to be psychic to your unspoken or vaguely hinted desires and then promoting people for telling you what you want to hear vs what you need to hear?
When I worked there (more than a decade ago) senior leaders and old-timers were extremely proud of the fact that they did things like sending "your Prime membership will renew in (a month - I think) - be sure to cancel if you don't want it to" emails. This was quite different from typical subscription services providers at the time.
In fact, I had more than one old-timer mention that they would ask employment candidates about the Prime pricing and renewal strategy and that candidates who said something along the lines of "it's best for people to subscribe and then never use it so we make margin on the service revenue" (along the lines of gym business models) would be rejected.
They really wanted people to want to be Prime members (this was even before Bezos' famous "you'd be irresponsible not to be a Prime member" comment...)