Eth 316 - Ethical Decisions - Amazon online Shopping

Ethical Decisions

David Land

ETH/316

September 2, 2015

Chosen Cheng

Ethical Decisions

Amazon online shopping is one of the biggest names out there for online shopping. When I have used their customer service by telephone, they have always seemed so happy and eager to help. However, due to the latest scandals from previous employees and rumors circling around the air, Amazon may not be the best place in the world to work. In this paper we will be discussing what happened with in this giant company and what the ethical issues are with all that. Lastly we will discuss, how to properly go about fixing such issues in this ethical dilemma.

Amazon has made us feel like they are the happiest people in the retail environment. From my own review this seems to be true. The employees with in the company call themselves Amazonians. This company has a first and foremost a very high turnover rate. This means that people do not stay in the company for very long. This would be considered a huge red flag because something with in the company is preventing from this place from being a great and happy place. This unhappy employee problem could stem from multiple things. One thing would have to be employees not getting along with one another. Another problem could be that they feel over worked and maybe not even getting the right pay for all of their worries. I did not find anything on employees directly not liking one another.

I did find that the employees were encouraged to tell on one another. One employee stated that this person was bullied in saying what was going on or wrong in the office. This was also followed by a huge sense of encouragement from the management team. The employee was suppose to basically spy on one another and then go run and tells their boss what they had witnessed. One could look at it as a strange way of from the outside looking in. Management would be able to see if something was not going right or employee bickering amongst themselves. In either scenario, it is ethically wrong to tell an employee to spy on another. This kind of behavior can lead to poor decision and even worse moral that may or may not be around.

Another reason for employee turnovers would be the office motto. The companies’ motto was to have a good balance of work and life. However, to Amazon, work was always to come first. These types of actions only hurt the company. These actions hurt the company because this directly will affect the morale around the office. If people cannot maintain that balance, then it is all work and no play in those offices. This will be a quick drive right out of the company for most people.

Another reason for high turn over rates in Amazon was the fact that the company was addicted to success, which as you can guess made the employees more than hungry for success. When the sales goals came in, the employees would try and fulfill that need for the company. The Amazonians became very addicted to success after this. They were going all out for those quotas or whatever the task might have been. Once this had gone on for a while, the employees became addicted and it went from a friendly company quota challenge to basically an all out war amongst one another and this brought turmoil amongst the employees. This quota became a lifestyle and it left the employees unable to be friendly with one another, it made them do unethical things to another. They would do things like talk bad about one another or even taking over each others order and/or phone calls that led to sales.