I own the part of Amazon where you try to leave.
The part where you join, I have never touched. Joining is one click, sometimes two, and in all my years no one has ever asked me to improve it. I own the other door. The one you use when you have decided you are done paying $139 a year and you would like that to stop. Inside the company we gave that door a name. We called it Iliad, after the poem about a war that took 10 years to end. We chose that name ourselves. We wrote it down. Sit with the fact that the people who built the exit named it after the longest war they could think of, and thought that was fair, and shipped it.
Here is leaving, on a laptop. Four pages. Six clicks. Fifteen times you are asked to choose something. Near the bottom of the last page, underneath the reminders of everything you are about to lose, there is a button that finally lets you go. Getting in took one click. I am proud of the distance between those two numbers. The distance is the product. I was measured on the distance.
People inside used honest words about this, in writing, which is the only place the truth was ever allowed to live. One memo called subscriptions "a bit of a shady world." Another called the unwanted ones "an unspoken cancer." A clearer version of the sign-up was proposed once, and it was turned down, because clarity would be a shock to the business, and a shock to the business is the one injury we are trained to prevent. So the memos got marked privileged, which is the office word for a truth you have written down and would prefer a court never reads.
A court read some of them. We paid $2.5 billion to make the rest of the reading stop. $1 billion of that is a penalty, the largest of its kind, and you should know that the largest penalty of its kind is still about a few weeks of what Prime brings in. The other $1.5 billion is for you. And this is the number I am proudest of in my whole career. The most any one of you can get back is $51.
$139 a year to be kept. $51 back for the keeping. For some of you, 6 years of it. Do the subtraction slowly. We are counting on you doing it fast.
Even the $51 is a door. To reach it you file a claim. You need a Claim ID and a PIN we sent to the same inbox you never open. You answer how many Prime benefits you used, a number no human being has ever known about themselves. Then the claim comes to us, and we decide, inside 30 days, whether you were really harmed, and the order says we may apply no other criteria. The company that built the maze grades your exam on whether you suffered in it.
I built the refund the way I built the cancellation. One door in. A long walk out. Because here is the line the headlines skipped. The $1.5 billion is really a $1 billion floor, and if too few of you file, the rest comes quietly home to us. Every claim you abandon is money handed back to the people who designed the thing you were leaving. The best refund, the one I dream about, is the one nobody ever comes to collect.
No one I work with paid a dollar of this out of pocket. No one lost a badge. The men the government named agreed to a 3-year order and walked back to the same desks. We settled 2 days into our own trial, the hour it became likely a stranger would get to see the memos. And that same summer, a different court threw out the national rule that would have made a plain cancel button the law for everyone. So we paid $2.5 billion for a hallway that is, for every other company in the country, still completely legal to build.
You already know this hallway. You have walked it at the gym, at the paper you read twice, at the service you swore you would cancel in March. You know the four screens asking if you are sure, the small gray "no thanks," the "continue" that was a "subscribe" the whole time. We did not invent the trap. We industrialized it, gave it the name of a war, and got a receipt most of you will never cash.
The last maze is the one you walk to get your money back.
It closes the way the first one was built to close. Quietly, on a schedule you were never told, with a button somewhere near the bottom that most people never reach.
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