#AMAZON ANDY JASSY JULY THEVERGE DRIVERS#

Less auspiciously, Amazon did not even attempt to offer any concessions of its own in hopes of preempting the agency’s case, and the federal judiciary has given the company ample reason to believe it is inclined to side with Big Tech. Fortunately for Americans, the Federal Trade Commission is widely reported to be on the verge of filing a comprehensive antitrust lawsuit seeking to break up Amazon. If Amazon’s stranglehold over e-commerce seemed impregnable while Clark was running things, the saga at Flexport vividly encapsulates how much stronger its dominance has become in a landscape of soaring interest rates and inflation-battered demand. His specific fireable offenses are not entirely clear, but Clark’s ouster was closely preceded by the announcement that Flexport’s most important partner was doing a major deal with … Amazon. Last week, his new employer, the ten-year-old Flexport, fired the Amazon veteran and at least a half dozen of his top recruits in unusually soap-operatic fashion, just a day after he appeared on a Fortune magazine podcast discussing his leadership style and plans for supply chain dominance.

#AMAZON ANDY JASSY JULY THEVERGE DRIVERS#

In 2021, the FTC ordered Amazon to repay its Flex drivers $61 million in stolen tips the previous year, it spent a staggering $61 billion on shipping alone.Īnd so it was probably inevitable that Dave Clark at the helm of the young San Francisco logistics startup proved unable to compete with the juggernaut Dave Clark had built with hundreds of billions of dollars in other people’s money. More than perhaps anyone at Amazon save Jeff Bezos himself, Clark embraced burning cash as a long-term strategy for making Amazon the shipper to the world, the gears behind and the toll collector for every transaction in the economy. He spent billions on planes and ships and warehouse robots, even custom manufacturing proprietary shipping containers. In 2015, Clark launched Amazon Flex, the much-loathed Uber-like platform that expanded the ranks of Amazon delivery drivers to millions of gig workers with promises of wages as high as $25 an hour the next year, he presided over a stealth cost-cutting initiative to secretly usurp tens of millions of dollars in tips customers had voluntarily paid to those same Flex drivers, despite multiple internal warnings from subordinates that such a move could ignite an “ Amazon reputation tinderbox.”īut in spite of his reputation as a penny-pincher among Amazon’s worker army, Clark was also famously extravagant when it came to expanding and protecting the company’s retail monopoly. Colleagues nicknamed a clique of intermediaries variously known within the company as “ Dave Whisperers” and “ Vesties” (for the sweater-vests), who interpreted Clark’s directives so as not to incur his wrath. The son of a Georgia carpet salesman, he joined the company the day he graduated business school in 1999, and built his reputation at the company not in Seattle but from a warehouse in Kentucky, where he once told fellow executives he made a habit of “lurking in the shadows scoping out slackers he could fire,” a vignette that won him the nickname “The Sniper.” Clark’s affect is unsettlingly bland: prodigious Diet Coke drinker and wearer of sweater-vests, whatever accent he’d grown up with suppressed into a deceptively low-key monotone. It was hard not to feel a hint of schadenfreude over the unusually public, mysteriously nasty firing of former Amazon worldwide operations czar Dave Clark, who’d last year joined a buzzy supply chain startup after getting beaten out for the top job at his former employer by his longtime rival Andy Jassy.įor nearly a quarter-century, Clark was the rare human embodiment of the dark side of a company that seems to outsource most of its dirty work to robots and algorithms. Dave Clark, then senior vice president of worldwide operations for Amazon, talks to reporters on June 27, 2018, in Seattle.

Amazon andy jassy july theverge