Bezos Will Always Be Part of Amazon, Jassy Says

Well, you know, I think different people want to do different jobs with different responsibilities at different times, and it's incredibly personal. I think Dave wanted a different gig at this point, and I don't begrudge him at all. I mean, Dave has added so much to Amazon over the last 23 years, and particularly over the last two and a half years, which have been among the most crazy in the history of Amazon. And I think that if you want to build a business that lasts a hundred plus years and that lasts all of us, you have to get used to these sort of transitions, make sure that you're doing the right succession planning, and you've got the right talent to keep building the business. And we've done that historically, and I expect we'll do it again.

Well, I wasn't planning on giving any guidance today, please. But super bad or super super bad? I think there's some things that relate to Amazon that are useful to remember. The first piece is, remember that 85% of the worldwide retail market share is offline. And if you believe that that equation is going to flip at some point, which we do, I think it will flip over a long period of time. But if you believe that the companies that have great customer experiences like we do are going to do all right. And great customer experiences mean you have really broad selection, low prices, and very fast delivery that's reliable to customers. I also think that if you look at different downturns, should we have one at some point, we've been through a few in the 25 years that I've been at Amazon. Customers change their habits. They tend to be pickier about what they buy, when they buy, and who they buy from, and they often pick the partners and companies that they trust, that have great customer experiences like the dimensions I mentioned earlier. Those two factors give me some optimism that even if we have a downturn, we have the potential to still grow. Regardless, we have so many things that we believe we can do better for customers. We have a roadmap that's probably three to five years long, and we're going to continue to invent, we're going to continue to be insurgent, and we have a lot of work to do to get to where we think we ultimately can get for customers.

Well, Jeff is always going to be involved. I feel very lucky to have been in Amazon for 25 years, and to have worked directly for Jeff for 20 of them. We have a really close relationship and have for a long time. I think we share a lot of the same values about customers and how important it is to optimize for customers, how high standards they need to be given how easy it is for people to switch, and the importance of invention and speed. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to work so closely with him. We still talk all the time. It's very useful for me to be able to seek his counsel. He did the job for so long, and he's always made himself available.

Yeah, of course. Every single job you have, the relationship's different. The first couple years I worked for Jeff, I worked as what we call the shadow then, which is really like a chief of staff. That was different than when I was starting AWS, which was different from when we got AWS going and it was a business that was starting to do well, and it's different now that I'm in the CEO role. But the constant has always been that we have a great relationship and we collaborate really well. I think that we listen to one another, and for me to have the ability to balance different things off them and seek his counsel is very valuable. And he's still focused on Amazon, he still has focus on Amazon.

Well, I think the first thing to be clear about is that employees get to make that choice whether they want to have a union or not. They always have had that choice and it continues to be their choice. We happen to think they're better off without a union for a number of reasons, including the fact that it's much harder when you have a union to have a direct relationship with your manager and to get things done quickly. If you see something on the line that you think could be better for your team or customers, you can't just go to your manager and say let's change this. There's a whole process and bureaucracy you have to go through to be able to do that. And when there's a union, we're going to get the feedback filtered by what the union decides is worth bringing up. We'd much rather hear from every employee whatever is on their mind. If you want to continue to have the structure that we've had for all this time, you have to have really competitive benefits. If you look at Amazon's benefits, they're very unusual in this space. We championed the $15 minimum wage several years ago. The starting salary is now over $18 an hour, which is more than double the federal minimum wage. You get full health insurance and 401(k), and up to 20 weeks of parental leave. And if you want to get a college education, we have a Career Choice program that lets our fulfillment center associates be able to do so. That is a very unusual and compelling set of benefits, and those were all accomplished without a union. We realize that we have to continue to work on the relationship with our employees, we need to continue to provide the right benefits, and we need to continue to work on safety, and that's our intention.