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e-mail accounts to answer questions from customers. The people handling these e-mails are generally overqualified, underpaid people with no experience in book selling. From the beginning, disaffected academics were popular because they were well-read and could supposedly help find books on a huge variety of topics. They were paid about $10 to $13 an hour, but with the potential of promotions and stock options dangled before their glazed eyes. Not everyone found nirvana in this environment. Richard Howard, for example, has a master's degree in literature, but decided to take the entry-level customer care job at Amazon in 1998 with hopes of moving into editorial, where he could write reviews of books. What he found was a work mill with four customer-service tier-one e-mail representatives to a cubicle. Workers listened in on calls to monitor performance and rated the workers by how many e-mails or phone calls they could answer per minute. Howard chronicled his experience for a Seattle newspaper in an article titled, How I Escaped from Amazon.Cult. Human interaction was treated almost as a necessary evil. Howard was given a blurb index, a list of hundreds of short, canned answers to cover virtually any question a customer might ask, which he felt were designed to create a blandly conventional zone of contact between Amazon's agents and customers. When Howard got a call from a customer one day asking how to find a copy of James Michener's Centennial, because the customer was interested in Civil War-era fiction, Howard suggested Gore Vidal's Lincoln as a better alternative, just the type of thing a knowledgeable employee in a good bookstore might do. Howard spent three or four minutes on the call, he said, and was reprimanded by his supervisor. After three and a half weeks on the job, he was fired for not being productive enough. He took a contract job at Microsoft instead. What the starry-eyed customer-service representatives with visions of huge stock options found when starting their jobs at Amazon was long hours and options for just one hundred Amazon shares, as long as they performed well for three years. The best could answer a dozen emails a minute. Those who dropped below seven were often fired. The Washington Post did an expose of this dark side of Amazon and quoted one customer-service rep as saying, We're supposed to care deeply about customers, provided we can care deeply about them at an incredible rate of speed. The customer-service reps also had to learn the Unix software system the company used and had to take a three-week training course at Amazon to learn how everything worked, including how orders for books were submitted, how they were delivered to the warehouse, how they were shelved, how to match orders to the packed books, and how to choose the best shipping method. The most frequent questions came from people who needed help ordering a book on the site or wanted to know where the book they had ordered was. But Bezos knew he would never be able to offer the kind of service one gets from a physical store staffed by human helpers. We're never going to have sofas, we're never going to have lattes, he told Businessweek magazine in June 1997. Where Bezos really managed to shine was in creating a great online experience with very little human interaction with customers. The site had to be simple, fast, and intuitive. It had to offer an unprecedented number of books at the cheapest price possible and deliver them quickly. The whole thing just had to work without problems so that people left the site happy. That seems to be enough for most people. When we do make a customer unhappy at some point, Bezos was later to explain, these people come out of the woodwork and say, well, actually, that wasn't my experience. Word of mouth is very powerful. That's especially true on the Internet, where word of mouth is viral. On the Internet, says Bezos, everybody is a publisher. They blog and they email, and they can turn nasty very quickly. Email, he says, has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in the human being. You get these very candid pieces of feedback that tell you exactly how you can improve your service. If I walk into a restaurant and am served a bad meal, I just leave. I never go find the chef and grab him by the collar and say, you know, you really shouldn't be cooking. But there have been a few occasions when emails and words spread virally through the Internet were intended to grab Bezos by his virtual collar to yell at him.