Dear Mr. Bezos,

I do apologize for using this address as I know you have stepped away from pesky things like whiny customer complaints but this one is too important to let rest as I know it involves a significantly larger number of your customers who are less driven to write in.

The issue is not even Amazon but rather the bank Amazon forces upon those customers who choose to use the Amazon-branded credit card and thus enjoy the perks. (I just enjoy the $$$$ back; don’t even know what other perks there are.)

JP Morgan Chase is not a bank but an entity designed to make your customers’ lives as miserable as possible. Requiring phone calls (an absolute anathema) for the simplest act like logging in to make a payment is not in tune with the modern world. Only Wells Fargo did a poorer job and I had actually refinanced my mortgage with worse terms to get away from the latter’s management arm.

I fired Chase ~2007 for what was already the functional opposite of customer-obsession. Unless, of course, one includes the pretense that forcing customers to enter a UFC-style octagon of customer “service” representatives who will spend 5 minutes repeating everything we say back to us presumably so that their translating program can tell them what we want.

I am not ready to fire Amazon as a company and certainly not for so tangential a reason. But I will be if this persists. The late Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines, required every executive to put in a shift per month working phones dealing with customers. I enjoyed the guesswork whenever I got someone on the line who just seemed too educated to work in phone-support. One actually did confirm that she was, in fact, an exec putting in her on-call shift. I thought this strategy was brilliant and have required the “support shift” from my own teams in almost every job I’ve had since. I hope you do something similar. But with those of your customers who use the AMZN-branded Chase card, I would request you try calling into their support and accomplishing the simplest thing. If you can, without profanity, I will print this letter on 30lb. paper and eat it in front of you.

Sincerely,

Simon Aloyts

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