On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

Counterintuitively, Zappos used to offer its workers a lump sum to quit, even in the warehouses. The amount of money started at $2,000 and increased the longer you’d been there. The theory was that this would weed out people who didn’t really want to be there and that it would keep the culture positive. It apparently worked—Katie turned the money down twice, and so did most people. CEO Tony Hsieh later wrote in Delivering Happiness, a history of Zappos, that less than 1 percent of Zappos employees took the offer. This is why, Hsieh writes, he used to let journalists roam free around Zappos buildings. “Unlike most companies, we don’t give reporters a small list of people they’re allowed to talk to. Instead, we encourage them to wander around and talk to whoever they want. It’s our way of being as transparent as possible, which is part of our culture.” Katie quit not too long after Amazon acquired Zappos and began changing its warehouses into fulfillment centers. “It was just… different. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was go, go, go all the time, like we were just robots to them.”