Amazon doesn’t care about efficiency and waste, and they certainly won’t tolerate innovation. This is all smoke they’ve been blowing.

Take it from someone who works there. Even the door desks that they like to famously point to as a show of frugality cost them more than if they just went to Ikea and bought real desks.

Yet two decades on they are still wasting money building door desks. Why is that?

Its all propaganda.

As someone who has previously worked for Amazon, I see Bezos’s PEDANTIC focus on the customer experience, and waste elimination to lower prices / improve margin, as the true magic of their success…not just for this year but has always been over the years.

This is where most companies miss it BIG TIME by thinking of operations efficiency as only as a cost cutting play…..and never understand how important it is to turn it into CSAT and marketing opportunity :)

Waste elimination and efficiency optimization is very true for Amazon also but you will never see Bezos say that as the objective. He always ploughs some of it back into customer experience and projects the rest for low prices, while driving sales with free cash flow….something we all need to learn and strive for in our companies.