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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric Wells who wrote (76702)	9/6/1999 12:51:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

September 6, 1999 COMPRESSED DATA Seattle Weekly Writer Turns Tables on Amazon By DAVID F. GALLAGHER hen Amazon.com Inc. came under fire recently for publishing lists of books and CD's popular with employees at major corporations, the company, which is based in Seattle, said that its so-called purchase circles were meant to be "fun and positive," not an invasion of privacy. That was all the inspiration that Mark D. Fefer needed. Fefer, a writer for Seattle Weekly, an alternative newspaper, decided it might be "really fun" to find out which pages on the paper's World Wide Web site were most popular with people who work at Amazon. So he asked the paper's Webmaster to analyze visits to the site from Net surfers with addresses at Amazon.com. Fefer presented the results in last week's issue and on the Web site. The article "How I 'Escaped' From Amazon.cult" -- a former employee's biting account of his unhappy life as a customer service representative -- remains a popular read among Amazon employees a year and a half after it was first posted on the Seattle Weekly site. Fefer also reported that Amazon employees were frequent visitors to the newspaper's online help-wanted section, and that they tended to use the site most in the early afternoon, checking out restaurant reviews and horoscopes. Fefer warned investors: "Amazon staffers are blowing your hard-earned capital on a lot of midday Internet surfing and weekend planning!" The point, Fefer said in an interview, was to have Amazon "find out a little bit of what it feels like" to face such scrutiny. Paul Capelli, an Amazon spokesman, said that his company had responded to concerns about the purchase circles by enabling customers and companies to stipulate that purchase data not be included in such lists. As for his own company's employees, Capelli said that the Seattle Weekly report gave little cause for worry. After all, he said, if workers are surfing the Net in the early afternoon, they are obviously not going out for long lunches. "I don't find that alarming," he said, "I find that gratifying."