Whole Foods was purchased by Amazon and now Whole Foods employees are miserable.  They run around a top speed, crying, and hating life.

“I wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares,” an anonymous staffer told Business Insider, which spoke to 27 current and former workers. “The stress has created such a tense working environment. Seeing someone cry at work is becoming normal.”

Did anybody expect anything different?

Did anybody read the famous New York Times article about Amazon.

SEATTLE — On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.

They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

  Working Amazon employees until they broke down was the norm.

Bo Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

If Bezos can break the soul of a programmer making over $100K per year, what can he do to somebody making $12/hour?

Jeff Bezos is a known hard-ass bastard, and a terrible boss and perhaps human being as well.

How did people not see this coming?

The question is, will Whole Foods survive?

Is Bezos’ way of running a company possible in brick and mortar retail?  I don’t think so.  You can only push some kid doing an hourly job so far before he quits.

You can tell me “kids these days don’t know what hard work is” but is a job you do part time after school worth the stress of going home and crying because your boss berates you in front of all the other employees as a motivational tool?

(That’s a real thing by the way, Bezos would get an employee up in front of all his or her coworkers and insult them – calling them stupid – until they broke down in tears.  This became part of Amazon culture where management is encouraged to insult, shame, and fire employees publicly.)

I doubt it.