Amazon actually plays its employees to quit their job

Warehouse job got you down? Amazon will pay up to $5,000 to send you packing. In his latest letter to shareholders, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos revealed an interesting policy dubbed “Pay to Quit,” in which the company offers associates in its fulfillment centers $2,000 to quit their jobs after one year of employment. Delivered to employees in a contract with the headline “Please Don’t Take This Offer,” the value of quitting increases by $1,000 every year thereafter, and taps out at $5,000.

Hate your job? Then quit. In fact, we’ll pay you to quit. That’s the philosophy at Amazon’s warehouses, according to a new letter by company CEO Jeff Bezos. Here’s a snippet from Bezos’ letter written to his shareholders this month (emphasis ours): “The second program is called Pay to Quit. It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers [warehouses] 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.”