The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (45 page)

Straightforwardness is cool.

Pandering to the crowd is not cool.

Hypocrisy is not cool.

Authenticity is cool.

Thinking big is cool.

The unexpected is cool.

Missionaries are cool.

Mercenaries are not cool.

On an attached spreadsheet, Bezos listed seventeen attributes, including
polite, reliable, risk taking,
and
thinks big,
and he ranked a dozen companies on each particular characteristic. His methodology was highly subjective, he conceded, but his conclusions, laid out at the end of the Amazon.love memo, were aimed at increasing Amazon’s odds of standing out among the loved companies. Being polite
and reliable or customer-obsessed was not sufficient. Being perceived as inventive, as an explorer rather than a conqueror, was critically important. “I actually believe the four ‘unloved’ companies are inventive as a matter of substance. But they are not perceived as inventors and pioneers. It is not enough to be inventive—that pioneering spirit must also come across and be perceivable by the customer base,” he wrote.

“I propose that one outcome from this offsite could be to assign a more thorough analysis of this topic to a thoughtful VP,” Bezos concluded. “We may be able to find actionable tasks that will increase our odds of being a stand out in that first group of companies. Sounds worthy to me!”

CHAPTER 11

The Kingdom of the Question Mark

As it neared its twentieth anniversary, Amazon had finally come to embody the original vision of the everything store, conceived so long ago by Jeff Bezos and David Shaw and set into motion by Bezos and Shel Kaphan. It sold millions of products both new and used and was continually expanding into new product areas; industrial supplies, high-end apparel, art, and wine were among the new categories introduced in 2012 and 2013. It hosted the storefronts of thousands of other retailers in its bustling Marketplace and the computer infrastructure of thousands of other technology companies, universities, and government labs, part of its flourishing Web Services business. Clearly Jeff Bezos believed there were no limits to the company’s mission and to the variety of products that could be sold on the Internet.

If you were to search the world for the polar opposite of this sprawling conglomerate, a store that cultivated not massive selection but an exclusive assortment of high-end products and thrived not on brand loyalty but on the amiable personality of its proprietor, you might just settle on a small bike shop north of Phoenix, in Glendale, Arizona. It’s called the Roadrunner Bike Center.

This somewhat grandiosely named establishment sits in a shoe-box-shaped space in an otherwise ordinary shopping center next to
the Hot Cutz Spa and Salon and down a ways from a Walmart grocery store. It offers a small selection of premium BMX and dirt bikes from companies like Giant, Haro, and Redline, brands that carefully select their retail partners and generally do not sell to websites or discount outlets. Many customers have patronized this store for years, even though it has moved three times within the Phoenix area.

“The old guy that runs this is always there and you can tell he loves to fix and sell bikes,” writes one customer in a typically favorable online review of the store. “When you buy from him he will take care of you. He also is the cheapest place I have ever taken a bike for a service, I think sometimes he runs a special for $30! That’s insane!”

A red poster board with the hand-scrawled words
Layaway for the holidays!
leans against an outside window of the store. It is no different than any mom-and-pop shop anywhere in the world that’s been carefully tended and nurtured by its owner over the course of thirty years. Except in this case, the store offers more than just a strong contrast to Amazon, and the evidence hangs inside, under the fluorescent lights, next to the front counter. Framed on the wall is a laminated old newspaper clipping with a photograph of a sixteen-year-old boy sporting a flattop haircut and standing up on the pedals of his unicycle, with one hand on the seat and the other flared daringly out to the side.

I found Ted Jorgensen, Jeff Bezos’s biological father, behind the counter of his store in late 2012. I had considered a number of ways he might react to my unannounced appearance, but I gave a very low probability to the likelihood of what actually happened: Jorgensen didn’t know who Jeff Bezos was or anything at all about a company named Amazon.com. He was utterly confused by what I was telling him and denied being the father of a famous CEO who was one of the wealthiest men in the world.

But then, when I mentioned the names Jacklyn Gise and Jeffrey,
the son they had during their brief teenage marriage, the old man’s face flushed with recognition and sadness. “Is he still alive?” he asked, not yet fully comprehending.

“Your son is one of the most successful men on the planet,” I told him. I pulled up some photographs of Bezos from the Internet, and, incredibly, for the first time in forty-five years, Jorgensen saw his biological son, and his eyes filled with emotion and disbelief.

I took Jorgensen and his wife, Linda, to dinner that night at a local steakhouse, and his story tumbled out. When the Bezos family moved from Albuquerque to Houston back in 1968, Jorgensen promised Jackie and her father that he would stay out of their lives. He remained in Albuquerque, performing with his troupe, the Unicycle Wranglers, and taking odd jobs. He drove an ambulance and worked as an installer for Western Electric, a local utility.

In his twenties, he moved to Hollywood to help the Wranglers’ manager, Lloyd Smith, start a new bike shop, and then he went to Tucson, looking for work. In 1972 he was mugged outside a convenience store after buying cigarettes. The assailants hit him with a two-by-four and broke his jaw in ten places.

Jorgensen moved to Phoenix in 1974, got remarried, and quit drinking. By that time he had lost touch with his ex-wife and their child and forgotten their new last name. He had no way to contact his son or follow his progress, and he says he felt constrained by his promise not to interfere in their lives.

In 1980, he put together every cent he had and bought the bike shop from its owner, who wanted to get out of the business. He has run the store ever since, moving it several times, eventually to its current location on the northern edge of the Phoenix metropolitan area, adjacent to the New River Mountains. He divorced his second wife and met Linda, his third, at the bike shop. She stood him up on their first date but showed up the next time he asked her out. They’ve been married for twenty-five years. Linda says they’ve talked privately about Jeffrey and replayed Ted’s youthful mistakes for years.

Jorgensen has no other children; Linda has four sons from a
previous marriage, and they are close with their stepfather, but he never divulged to them that he had another child—he says he didn’t think there was any point. He felt it was a “dead-end street” and was sure he would never see or hear anything about his son again.

Jorgensen is now sixty-nine; he has heart problems, emphysema, and an aversion to the idea of retirement. “I don’t want to sit at home and rot in front of the television,” he says. He is endearingly friendly and, his wife says, deeply compassionate. (Bezos strongly resembles his mother, especially around the eyes, but he has his father’s nose and ears.) Jorgensen’s store is less than thirty miles from four different Amazon fulfillment centers, but if he ever saw Jeff Bezos on television or read an article about Amazon, he didn’t make the connection. “I didn’t know where he was, if he had a good job or not, or if he was alive or dead,” he says. The face of his child, frozen in infancy, has been stuck in his mind for nearly half a century.

Jorgensen says that he always wanted to reconnect with his son—whatever his occupation or station—but he blames himself entirely for the collapse of his first marriage and is ashamed to admit that, all those years ago, he agreed to stay out of his life. “I wasn’t a good father or a husband,” he says. “It was really all my fault. I don’t blame Jackie at all.” Regret, that formidable adversary Jeff Bezos worked so hard to outrun, hangs heavily over the life of his biological father.

When I left Jorgensen and his wife after dinner that night, they were wistful and still in shock and had decided that they weren’t going to tell Linda’s sons. The story seemed too far-fetched.

But a few months later, in early 2013, I got a phone call from the youngest son, Darin Fala, a senior project manager at Honeywell who also lives in Phoenix and who spent his teenage years living with Jorgensen and his mother.

Jorgensen, Fala told me, had called a family meeting the previous Saturday afternoon. (“I bet he’s going to tell us he has a son or daughter out there,” Fala’s wife had guessed.) In dramatic fashion, Jorgensen and Linda explained the unlikely situation.

Fala described the gathering as wrenching and tear-filled. “My
wife calls me unemotional because she has never seen me cry,” Fala says. “Ted is the same way. Saturday was the most emotion I’ve ever seen out of him, as far as sadness and regret. It was overwhelming.”

Jorgensen had decided he wanted to try to reach out to the Bezos family and reestablish contact, and Fala was helping him craft his letters to Bezos and his mother. They would send those letters via both regular mail and e-mail in February of 2013, and would end up waiting nearly five months for a response. Bezos’s silence on the topic of his long-lost biological father is unsurprising: he is far more consumed with pressing forward than looking back.

During the phone call, Fala related a discovery of his own. Curious about Bezos, he had watched several clips on the Internet of the Amazon CEO being interviewed, including one from
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
And Fala was startled to hear Bezos’s notorious, honking laugh.

It was the same unrestrained guffaw that had once echoed off the walls of Fala’s childhood home, though over the past few years it had gradually been inhibited by emphysema. “He has Ted’s laugh!” Fala says in disbelief. “It’s almost exact.”

* * *

Bezos undoubtedly received and read Jorgensen’s e-mail—colleagues say that, with his personal assistants, he reviews all the messages sent to his widely known e-mail address, [email protected]. In fact, many of the more infamous episodes inside Amazon began with unsolicited e-mails from customers that Bezos forwarded to the relevant executives or employees, adding only a question mark at the top of the message. To the recipients of these e-mails, that notation has the effect of a ticking time bomb.

Within Amazon, an official system ranks the severity of its internal emergencies. A Sev-5 is a relatively inconsequential technical problem that can be solved by engineers in the course of the workday. A Sev-1 is an urgent problem that sets off a cavalcade of pagers (Amazon still gives them to many engineers). It requires an
immediate response, and the entire situation will later be reviewed by a member of Bezos’s management council, the S Team.

Then there’s an entirely separate kind of crisis, what some employees have informally dubbed the Sev-B. That’s when an e-mail containing the notorious question mark arrives directly from Bezos. When Amazon employees receive one of these missives, they drop everything they are doing and fling themselves at whatever issue the CEO is highlighting. They’ve typically got a few hours to solve the problem and prepare a thorough explanation for how it occurred in the first place, a response that will be reviewed by a succession of managers before the answer is presented to Bezos himself. The question mark e-mails, often called escalations, are Bezos’s way to ensure that potential problems are addressed and that the customer’s voice is always heard inside Amazon.

One of the more memorable recent episodes at Amazon began with such an escalation in late 2010. It had come to Bezos’s attention that customers who browsed—but didn’t buy—in the lubricant section of Amazon’s sexual-wellness category were receiving personalized e-mails promoting a variety of gels and other intimacy facilitators. Even though the extent of Bezos’s communication to his marketing staff consisted of a single piece of punctuation, they could tell—he was pissed off. Bezos believed the marketing department’s e-mails caused customers embarrassment and should not have been sent.

Bezos likes to say that when he’s angry, “just wait five minutes,” and the mood will pass like a tropical squall.
¹
When it comes to issues of bungled customer service, though, that is rarely true. The e-mail marketing team knew the topic was delicate and nervously prepared an explanation. Amazon’s direct-marketing tool was decentralized, and category managers could generate e-mail campaigns to customers who had looked at certain product categories but did not make purchases. Such e-mails tended to tip vacillating shoppers into buying and were responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in Amazon’s annual sales. In the case of the lubricant
e-mail, though, a low-level product manager had clearly overstepped the bounds of propriety. But the marketing team never got to send this explanation. Bezos was demanding a meeting to discuss the issue.

On a weekday morning, Jeff Wilke, Doug Herrington, Steven Shure (the vice president of worldwide marketing and a former executive at Time Inc.), and several other employees gathered and waited solemnly in a conference room. Bezos glided in briskly. He started the meeting with his customary “Hello, everybody,” and followed that with “So, Steve Shure is sending out e-mails about lubricants.”

Bezos didn’t sit down. He locked eyes with Shure. He was clearly fuming. “I want you to shut down the channel,” he said. “We can build a one-hundred-billion-dollar company without sending out a single fucking e-mail.”

There was an animated argument. Amazon’s culture is notoriously confrontational, and it begins with Bezos, who believes that truth springs forth when ideas and perspectives are banged against each other, sometimes violently. In the ensuing scrum, Wilke and his colleagues argued that lubricants were available in grocery stores and drugstores and were not, technically, that embarrassing. They also pointed out that Amazon generated a significant volume of sales with such e-mails. Bezos didn’t care; no amount of revenue was worth jeopardizing customer trust. It was a revealing—and confirming—moment. He was willing to slay a profitable aspect of his business rather than test Amazon’s bond with its customers. “Who in this room needs to get up and shut down the channel?” he snapped.