The First Amazon Home Office

Across The Street from the Needle Exchange

The First Amazon Home Office

When I went for my first interview with Amazon, John Vlastelica (my recruiter) gave me an address and told me the time and day. The location was 1516 Second Avenue in the Columbia Building. I showed up there and was not overly impressed. It was a small building. One door with a receptionist and an elevator to the upper floors. The first floor of that building was mostly the Art Bar, a dive bar. After a busy weekend at the Art Bar, our floors often smelled smoky from the bar below.

During my first interview, I met with 5 different people. They asked tough questions. Rick Dalzell, my friend from Wal-Mart and then Amazon CIO, took me for lunch at Pike Market. Rick ordered a beer. Whoa!

Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

I got the job. A month later, I reported for my first day. They gave me a blue paper badge, sandwiched between clear contact paper — no lamination, no picture. Turns out this building wasn’t the first Amazon office. Jeff’s garage is the historically correct answer.

The office was crowded. I shared an office with another director, Charlie Bell who had started a few months before me. He was a seasoned technology professional, roughly my age. We both stayed busy with our teams during the day and generally visited in the mornings. We were both morning folks. Together, we figured out the ropes. We both reported directly to Rick Dalzell, the CIO.

At Wal-Mart, the break rooms had coffee for 10 cents per cup. Not great coffee but well worth the dime. At Amazon, we walked over to Starbucks.

At Wal-Mart, lunch was either the on-site cafeteria or Pizza Hut. At Amazon, lunch was an adventure. So many cultures and food I knew nothing about. I learned about pho, banh mi, and yakisoba with pickled ginger. Now some of my favorites. Pike Market a block away. Very cool!

One of the areas that I managed was Customer Service. The customer service team, handling all calls and emails, had its own nearby building. It was close enough to the office on 2nd Ave that I could walk.

CS was a scrappy group. There were cubes but folks had put blankets over the top and decorated their cube as a little apartment. It was a bit strange, but I didn’t mind. The vibe was definitely not like Wal-Mart. They were having fun while performing a tough job. Customers seldom called CS to tell them how great their experience was.

Down the street near Pine Street we had a basement of a building which was the data center. I was responsible for Data Warehousing and our equipment was in that building so I was there frequently. It was also walkable from the Columbia Building.

We had two warehouses at that time. One was in Delaware serving the east coast and the other was in South Seattle on Dawson Street. When I joined Amazon, we were only selling books so Dawson was set up with lines and lines of bookshelves. Thanks to Cedric Ross, who taught me the ins and outs of random stow, it was ingenious. Coming from my Wal-Mart distribution background, we stored and shipped cases, not individual items. That was the one thing that biased Wal-Mart against online. Online was individual items, Wal-Mart distribution centers sent cases and pallets, to stores.

Each Christmas, everyone who could, went to the warehouse to help out. We picked and packed our way through the season.

In January of 1999, everybody in the Columbia Building was told to straighten up their offices and work areas. Get anything confidential out of sight. CBS reporter Bob Simon was coming to do a feature on Amazon and Jeff. It felt like we were about to step onto the national stage.

This story is part of Retail Tales Never Told, a collection documenting Robert Davis’s 35 years of retail evolution from the backrooms of the giants to the modern homestead in the Cascades.

[embed]Retail Tales Never Told Inside Stories from 35 Years of Retail Technology — NCR, Walmart, Amazon, and Robert Davismedium.com

**https://medium.com/stories-about-robert-davis-wal-mart-amazon/retail-tales-never-told-4a23ae23e67e**