I heard Jeff tell this story and it was about a dining table that often arrived with a gouge in the top surface. It was costing Amazon a lot to ship, and a lot to get it returned, and the table was essentially worthless when returned. Even if only 5% of the tables are returned, this makes selling this table a loss maker. Quickest way to increase profits -- stop doing things that make you a loss!
So the lesson from the anecdote is that Amazon wasn't actually Obsessed with the Customer, but maximizing profit, and in this case they just happened to align.
Making customers happy isn't totally orthogonal to making money right?
In midwit meme format:
Low wit: Make customers happy. Making customers happy is how you sell products and win customers from competitors
Midwit: Screw over customers for profit. Customers are kind of low information though right? Maybe we can do things that increase profits at the expense of the customer if the customer wont notice or attribute it to us
High wit: Make customers happy. While an individual customer is low information, in aggregate, doing these things causes a company's reputation to suffer a death by a thousand cuts.
