Amazon Pays Its Staff Up To $5,000 If They Quit — No Strings Attached

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jeff bezos

Jeff Bezos  Amazon Inc.

Here's our favorite part of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' annual letter to shareholders. He describes how the company will pay Amazon's warehouse workers up to $5,000 to quit their jobs.

The intent of the program is to ensure that Amazon only retains people who really, really want to work at Amazon:

The second program is called Pay to Quit. It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is “Please Don’t Take This Offer.” We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.

You can read the entire letter here.

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Jim is the former editor-in-chief of Insider's news division.Previously he was the founding editor of Business Insider UK.He has also been managing editor at Adweek, an advertising columnist at CBS Interactive, and a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia Business School. His work has appeared in Slate, Salon, The Independent, MTV, The Nation and AOL.His investigative journalism changed the law in the US First Circuit Court of Appeals (U.S. v. Kravetz), the Third Circuit Court of Appeals (North Jersey Media v. Ashcroft), New Jersey (In Re El-Atriss), and New York State (Mosallem v. Berenson).The US Supreme Court cited his work on the death penalty in the concurrence to Baze v. Rees, on the issue of whether lethal injection is cruel or unusual.He won the Neal award for business journalism in 2005 for a series investigating bribes and kickbacks in the advertising business.Here's a selection of his past stories:   • The alleged betrayal in these photos, texts, and emails cost Snapchat $158 million   • Inside the conspiracy that forced Dov Charney out of American Apparel   • The Evolution of Ev: The creator of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium has a plan to fix the mess he made of the internet   • THE "KNOCK-IN SHORT": Nigel Farage and the massive bet against the pound on the night of the Brexit vote   • eBay worked with the FBI to put its top affiliate marketer in prison   • How Dunkin Donuts ended up hiring a psychotic credit card thief as director of communications   • BEJEWELED: The definitive, illustrated history of the most underrated game ever   • The CEO of Publicis told us how he stared down a furious internal rebellion to bet the future of his $11 billion company on artificial intelligence   • FBX: The billion-dollar Facebook business that never happened   • The €150 million check-kiting scam that bankrupted Leo Burnett in Greece   • My Polaroids of the September 11 attacks led me into America's secret court system for terrorist suspects   • YouTube deleted 130 rap videos to help police fight street gangs responsible for thousands of stabbingsDisclosure: I own shares of Twitter (TWTR).