Dave Ross may spend more at thought of crying Amazon workers

Deciding to cancel a purchase through Amazon could be costing people their jobs and is creating a dilemma for KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross.

With all the information Amazon tracks on its website, decisions customers make could be directly impacting someone’s job security, he points out.

“Everything that happens on a website is relentlessly measured,” Dave says.

Amazon keeps track of how long someone reads a Kindle book, or if that person leaves a Web page because it loads too slow, for example. That information is sent straight back to employees &#8212 and their bosses.

“Yikes,” Dave says at the thought of that. “When I go on Amazon, the way I behave on a Web page could directly affect [someone’s] future in South Lake Union. They’ll try to find out why I didn’t buy all that stuff.”

It’s a scary thought, especially if the report of how tough it is to work at Amazon is true, even though CEO Jeff Bezos said it’s not.

“You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” Bo Olson, formerly in books marketing, told the Times. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

Dave says when he decides not to purchase something from Amazon, it’s nothing personal. He either has something else to do or he gets frightened away by the total cost of his cart.

But now Dave has a vision of employees being criticized for him not buying anything: “Why didn’t you make those products more attractive so Dave bought those?”