Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (37 page)

SIX

PLUTOCRATS AND THE REST OF US

If you really wanted to examine percentage-wise who was hurt the most on their income, it was Wall Street brokers.

—Alan Greenspan, shortly after his appointment as chairman of Gerald Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1974, explaining the impact of inflation

He was remembering now why he didn’t like the rich: their self-pity. Persecution was the common ground of their conversation, like sport or the weather for everyone else.

—Robert Harris,
The Fear Index

A stranger to human nature, who saw the indifference of men about the misery of their inferiors and the regret and indignation which they feel for the misfortunes and sufferings of those above them, would be apt to imagine that pain must be more agonizing and the convulsions of death more terrible to persons of higher rank than to those of meaner stations.

—Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments

D
ELIVERING
H
APPINESS

If you ever have to work at a call center, make sure it is Zappos. The online retailer has built a business around the idea of, as founder Tony Hsieh put it in his bestselling advice book cum autobiography,
Delivering Happiness
, the unlikely premise that buying and selling stuff over the phone can be an emotionally nurturing experience for both parties. In pursuit of that goal, Zappos has created a corporate culture so widely admired that the online shoe seller now has a business sideline teaching others how to operate the Zappos way—for $5,000 and two days of your time, you and your top team can be trained on how to bring the Zappos culture back to your own cubicles.

A cheaper option is to take one of the free company tours Zappos offers to anyone who wants one, including complimentary pickup and return on a bus driven by one of the characteristically upbeat members of what they call “the Zappos family.” When I stepped outside my hotel on the Las Vegas strip and got on board on a blisteringly hot day in August 2010, a vacationing family of three from Virginia were already seated. They had been recruited to make the visit the day before while hiking in one of the canyons outside the city. There they met an evangelical Zappos employee—there is no other kind—who urged them to visit.

On the outside, Zappos’s headquarters in Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, is a typically nondescript, low-rise building in a corporate park surrounded by desert and freeways. But inside you can start to see what all the fuss is about. Visitors are greeted by a popcorn machine, hula hoops, a take-what-you-like bookshelf, and badges with an array of colorful markers and the instruction “Pimp your name tag.” The mood is part self-improvement seminar—the bookshelf is heavy on the works of Jim Collins and Clay Christensen—part wacky college dorm, and part low-rent version of luxe Silicon Valley firms like Google and Facebook. Zappos, too, has free food and a concierge desk for employees, but neither is quite up to the swish standards of the Valley.

When we meet for lunch at a steakhouse a five-minute drive away (this is one of those neighborhoods without sidewalks), Hsieh tells me he moved Zappos from San Francisco to Las Vegas because the city has “a call center population” and a twenty-four/seven culture. That’s a nice way of saying this is a place where you can find the lower-skilled, lower-paid workers you need for customer service. Within that universe, though, Zappos really does deliver on its promise of being “free from boring work environments, go-nowhere jobs, and typical corporate America!”

Our tour guide—he proudly informs us that you need to know two hundred things about Zappos to be a certified host—says, “I was working at a call center that was kind of the opposite of this—kind of a sweatshop” before joining two and a half years earlier. A year and a half earlier he’d recruited his better half: “I was having great days and my wife wasn’t, so I got her a job here.”

Part of the appeal is that Zappos—core value number three: create fun and a little weirdness—encourages its employees to let their freak flags fly: when you walk past the cubicles of the recruiting team, they blast you with music and wave barbells in time, brightly colored mullet wigs and feather boas are a favored work accessory, and the otherwise grim rows of cubicles and windowless meeting rooms are enlivened with homemade decor that includes bright balloons, streamers, and Chinese dragons.

A lot of life at Zappos is about “WOW”—core value number one: deliver Wow through service—and that delight starts with making employees feel privileged to work at Zappos. In my two days in Henderson I was told a dozen times that “you have a better chance of getting into Harvard than getting a job here.” On a “WOW!” wall—writing on the walls is, of course, positively encouraged—someone had written, “I am WOW’ed that people want to tour my job.” There is a “Royalty Room,” complete with throne and crowns, because “when you see yourself as royalty, you will treat yourself and other people better.”

Members of the Zappos family are taught to deliver WOW by going “above and beyond the average level of service to create an emotional impact on the receiver and give them a positive story they can take with them the rest of their lives.” Everyone at Zappos has a personal tale of WOW—our tour guide’s is sending flowers to a caller because her daughter had been in a car accident—and performing these small acts of kindness seems to be as delightful for the giver as it is for the receiver.

“I’m completely happy answering the phones—and that sounds insane,” Michael Evon, a forty-year-old mother of two with braces, blond hair, and blue eyes, told me. “They really let me accommodate the customer. There are a lot of exceptions made and it gives you a great feeling—you are able to help someone.”

Sometimes, that help is just having a good, long chat. Zappos employees pride themselves on marathon conversations with shoppers—an astonishing and humanizing goal in a line of work where getting off the phone as quickly as possible is usually the goal. Evon’s longest is six hours—a little short of the record seven and a half hours—with a customer who called to return a pair of shoes and ending up buying a bathing suit and bonding. “She was fifty and I just happened to be the same astrological sign as the guy she’s dating,” Evon said. “It was things I love—fashion, travel, and psychology.”

Evon’s best WOW was straight out of a Jodi Picoult novel: the mother of an autistic girl called because the shoes she had purchased for her daughter didn’t fit. But simply returning the shoes and replacing them with a more comfortable pair would be a problem because the autistic girl would be upset to be parted from the ill-fitting pair. A compassionate Evon let the customer keep the old shoes and sent her the right-size pair at no extra cost. Courtney, the mother, sent Evon a grateful e-mail, which she proudly shared with me: “She was very sympathetic of my situation and I was very grateful and appreciative of the service and attention she showed me. . . . With customer service agents like that, I will definitely continue to shop with Zappos. . . . Oh, and the replacements fit GREAT!! Thank you Michael and thank you Zappos!”

The Zappos family makes a point of flattening the corporate hierarchy. The company’s ruling troika are described as “our monkeys” on the corporate Web site (the third most powerful executive, Fred Mossler, has no title at all), everyone pitches in answering the phones during peak holiday periods, and there is no dress code. On the day I visited, top bosses, including Hsieh, had posed in a dunk tank, allowing themselves to be dumped in a pool in the parking lot to raise money for charity. There are no corner offices at Zappos. The executives sit in the same rows of cubicles as everyone else; Hsieh and his then CFO, Alfred Lin, had decorated their row of desks with streamers and stuffed animals chosen to evoke a jungle theme.

For wage slaves from elsewhere, Zappos exerts a powerful appeal. “I’m moving here. I’m done,” said Greg, the Virginia father, who works as a paralegal in Washington, D.C., and was in Las Vegas for a law conference. “I love that—the CFO just has a desk on the floor.”

“Yeah, it’s like that at your firm, isn’t it,” Joanne, his wife, said sarcastically.

Hsieh and his team have performed a miracle humanizing what can be one of the most alienating jobs in the service economy. If you are a Zappos customer—I, too, have had my WOW with the magical provision of a hard-to-find pair of running shoes—you are a beneficiary of the happy workers their approach inspires.

—

But if you look closely enough inside Zappos, you can see another story, too. That is the tale of the 1 percent and the 99 percent and how sharply their lives and life prospects differ—even if they sit at the same row of cubicles and eat in the same cafeteria.

Inside the Zappos family, the 99 percent are inordinately proud of working at a place that is harder to get into than Harvard. But while Evon attended local community college without getting a degree, Zappos’s effective founders actually went to Harvard—Hsieh and Lin met as undergraduates at Quincy House, where the former was struck by the latter’s vast appetite for pizza. Slacking off was never an option—both are the children of Tiger Mother immigrants from Taiwan.

Lin recalls that his parents told him and his brother, who went on to trade derivatives for Credit Suisse, that they would be “temporarily poor” in their first years in the United States. The boys both attended Stuyvesant High School, one of New York City’s top, application-only public schools, where they were such enthusiastic members of the math club they now contribute to its support. Lin studied applied math at Harvard and went on to start a PhD at Stanford, until he was rescued from the academic grind by Hsieh, who cajoled him into joining him at his first company, LinkExchange. They sold it to Microsoft two years later for $265 million.

Hsieh likes to depict himself as something of a rebel against the Tiger upbringing. In his autobiography he proudly describes evading violin practice by playing a tape of himself to convince his alert mother he was hard at it. But Hsieh was enough of a scholar to study computer programming at Harvard and get a first job at Oracle, before deciding, less than a year out of college, that the real opportunity was in starting his own business and being part of the Internet revolution.

Not yet forty, Hsieh and Lin are already multimillionaires—Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion in stock—for whom life has become a series of appealing choices. When I was in Henderson, Lin had just accepted an offer from Michael Moritz, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, to return to the West Coast and join his firm. Hsieh was about to go on a cross-country bus tour to promote his book.

Evon’s shift starts at six a.m.—being a few minutes late is a firing offense—and her workweek includes Saturdays and Sundays. She isn’t complaining: “It’s okay. When you are hired here they say if you take this position we need you when we need you.” Unemployment was nearly 15 percent in Nevada and her husband was working as a real estate agent in a market where house prices had fallen by a third over the past two years. One of the perks at Zappos is free lunch, and many of the parents who work there, at a call center starting salary of $11.50 an hour, told me they made a point of eating their main meal at work to spare their family grocery budget.

At Zappos, where everyone wears jeans and no one has an office, the chasm between the top and the bottom is as sharp as it gets. This paradox of an egalitarian culture coexisting with extreme economic and social inequality is a crucial and often overlooked part of the relationship between the super-elite and everyone else.

Most of today’s “working rich” plutocrats didn’t start out hugely privileged. And many of them operate in worlds—Silicon Valley and also the trading floors of Wall Street and its service firms such as Bloomberg, where one of the biggest corporate faux pas is to demand an office—in which the cultural dividing lines between the tribunes and the hoi polloi are intentionally blurred. But, of course, even if the billionaire is in a T-shirt and drives his own car, his universe is very different from that of a call center worker. Below is an exploration of what the plutocrats think of the rest of us.

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ILLIONAIRE IN
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