Amazon: Jeff bezos

Amazon, one of our time’s biggest businesses offering both retail and wholesale sales, started from scratch, just from a mere dream and the desire to do better. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Amazon, was once a ‘Dreamer Boy’ who believed in himself that one day he would build up an online book store with a lot of titles, something that was so hard to be achieved at that time. People didn’t believe him as they couldn’t picture whatever Jefferey was dreaming of creating. When the idea came up, he was working at an investment company and had the guts to quit to venture into something that he is so green in that takes a real man. Who on earth quits a job to start up something with no even funds at hand but to depend on contributions from other people? The burning desire to build Amazon kept him going, and at the end of the day, he achieved it through many failures, and he says that it is through failing that Amazon has come to be. Like Amazon, they have made more than enough mistakes, and they have failed several times to the point of losing it, but they have never quit. A dream has come to happen, and a big population is gaining from it, from the citizens, government, the needy, and everyone. Hope and determination can make one’s dream come to reality.

The first thing to note is that Jeffery uses pathos to tell the audience about himself to have a positive view of him and sympathize with him. He tries to reach out to the audience’s emotions by describing his life history from before his conception, the life of his parents, to when he grew to be a successful entrepreneur. He starts his speech by recounting his parents’ hard life and how they found it so hard schooling. People then get to realize that Bezos just came from a poor background where wealth was unheard of. Jeffery’s mode of conversation enables him to relate well with the audience because through the narration of his life history, Jeffrey can invoke the feeling that there is hope despite humble beginnings through determination. This could be seen especially when Jeffrey says, “It was a decision that I made with my heart and not my head…most of our regrets are acts of omission-…And I decided that if I didn’t at least give it my best shot, I was going to regret not trying….”

To complement pathos in his speech, he also uses anecdotes to support his appeal to the audience as a person who has come from a humble beginning and managed to rise to be the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Amazon. First, he brings in the anecdote of when he used to see his grandfather solving problems that seemed unsolvable as a child. This anecdote creates a picture to the audience of where Jeffrey acquired his resilience from and concludes that he had a strong upbringing that helped him achieve what he has achieved today. In addition to this, as Jeffrey chronologically explains the hard life he went through to achieve what he has in life, he further invokes vivid imagery as the audience can imagine the different scenarios described. In addition to this, Jeffrey further evoked anecdote

Secondly, in his speech Jeff Bezos employs ethos. He makes different ethical appeals that help define what Amazon owes its success to. Other than his determination as to the founder, he acknowledges the need for American employees as a means to create jobs in local communities. With this in mind, Jeff describes how they value their employees by providing different training programs that enable them to acquire and furnish their skills further. With this in mind, Jeff further uses anecdote by providing a story of an employee who, through the use of career choice available in Amazon, she could leave Amazon and live her dream as a medical assistant.

Further, other than employees, in his speech, Jeff also uses ethos in explaining the importance of incorporating small businesses in Amazon despite the fact that Amazon is already a well-established entity. Jeff supports his notion of ethos by explaining that Amazon helps small businesses by bringing them on board to sell through them. Often, entrepreneurs, after making progress, abandon their older ways of doing things. Some would prefer only to be selling wholesale, abandoning the retail business, but this is not the case in Amazon. They adore the retail business, and this makes a great portion of their revenues. It is estimated that retail sales make about 80% of the total revenue. Amazon understands that everyone started from somewhere and decided to invite the small businesses to come on board and sell through them. Many people did not agree with this and took it as the first step towards the fall of Amazon, but Bezos was determined in this journey. Bringing the third party into the business was a very controversial idea, but Amazon had a reason for it and was determined to achieve whatever he wanted from it. Over the years, the idea has worked and has made great progress. These two circumstances, as illustrated, show Jeff employing ethos to convince his audience further that not only was Amazon’s success owed to him as the founder, but also he acknowledges the impact employees and the small businesses have had to enable Amazon to be the successful company it is today. This appeases the audience how amazon is a company governed by morally upright policies.

Other than the use of pathos and ethos, in his speech, Jeff makes a point in ensuring that the audience has had a clear picture of him as one who appreciates the effort of family, family history, and the public. Using this as part of his speech ensured that the audience understood him as a human, one who is as equal as his audience. His speech at the beginning referenced his family history and how he adored learning and spending time with his grandfather, just like any other child his age. At this point, he was bringing out the aspect of how he shared the same values and beliefs of any other person in the audience. He used clear language in articulating his experiences and was also straightforward in claiming his humble background. He was also keen on ensuring that he did not talk about himself. Most of his speech revolved around his family, employees, and clients to whom he owed his success. This further helped him to convince the audience that he was not a selfish person. At one point, he used ethos in appealing to Amazon clients. He focused on ensuring that he acknowledged how Amazon is keen to ensure that the clients’ interests and needs were met by being rhetorical. He was rhetorical when he asked the audience as to why Amazon had an obsessive customer focus. He further answered his rhetoric question by saying that “customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy….”

Next, Jeff Bezos uses his rhetoric skills to convince their competitors that they need to be up to the task and pay their employees reasonable amounts. He claims that only Amazon is paying $ 15 an hour to the lowest level employee, an amount that has even doubled that of the federal, and he has urged them to add their pay to their employees. “We’ve challenged other large retailers to match our $ 15minimum wage. Target did so recently and just last week so did Best Buy. We welcome them, and they remain the only ones to have done so.” (Amazon, 2020, par23) He asks their competitors not only to concentrate on the benefits that their employees are bringing on board but also have a program that is in their support, “we do not skimp on benefits either. Our full-time hourly employees receive the same benefits as our salaried headquarters employees.” (Amazon, 2020, par 23). Bezos’s words are that other businesses are not doing what they need to do and should use them as the standard company for measurement.

In conclusion, Amazon, an idea developed from scratch, received several critics, failed severally, and was started from funds received from donations, is changing the world through many ways like offering employment, nature protection, and offering products in good conditions at reasonable prices to people. Through determination, hope, and hard work, a dream is realized. Jeff Bezos is a true hero working towards making the earth a better place to live, who knew that his dream would one day change the world in this great way.

Work Cited

Staff, A. (2020, July 28). Statement by Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the judiciary. US About Amazon. Retrieved September 15, 2021, from http://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/statement-by-jeff-bezos-to-the-u-s-house-committee-on-the-judiciary.