Here's our favorite part of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' annual letter to shareholders. He describes how the company will pay Amazon's warehouse workers up to $5,000 to quit their jobs. 
 
 The intent of the program is to ensure that Amazon only retains people who really, really want to work at Amazon: 
 
 The second program is called Pay to Quit. It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is “Please Don’t Take This Offer.” We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company. 
 
 You can read the entire letter here. 
 
 Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions. ||||| An employee pushes a cart past rows of storage aisles as he processes customer orders ahead of shipping at one of Amazon.com Inc.'s fulfillment centers in Rugeley, U.K., on Monday, Dec. 2, 2013. Online retailers in the U.K. are anticipating their busiest day as shoppers flush with end-of-month pay-checks seek Christmas deals on the Web. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images | Bloomberg via Getty Images 
 
 Hate your job? Then quit. In fact, we'll pay you to quit. 
 
 That's the philosophy at Amazon's warehouses, according to a new letter by company CEO Jeff Bezos. Here's a snippet from Bezos' letter written to his shareholders this month (emphasis ours): 
 
 The second program is called Pay to Quit. It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers [warehouses] have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is “Please Don’t Take This Offer.” We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company. 
 
 The idea is based on a program employed by Zappos, a shoe and clothing retailer now owned by Amazon, which offers new hires a bonus to quit. (Apparently very few of them take it.) 
 
 But Amazon warehouses are often staffed by temporary workers who wouldn't qualify for the pay to quit program. An Amazon representative confirmed to The Huffington Post that the program is only for full-time Amazon employees. 
 
 Amazon warehouses are massive distribution centers where workers often work long shifts performing grueling physical labor while fetching customer orders. 
 
 Amazon and workers at warehouses in Nevada are currently in the midst of a lawsuit being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court . The lawsuit concerns long waits in mandatory security check points that are meant to prevent workers from stealing pricey goods. The case will determine whether Amazon and other companies have to compensate workers for the time they're forced to wait in line. 
 
 This story has been updated to include comment from Amazon. ||||| Buy Photo Amazon received $30 million in property tax breaks from three counties for 20 years, and $14.9 million in state grants for infrastructure or job training at its five Tennessee distribution facilities, state records show. (Photo: File / The Tennessean )Buy Photo 
 
 Amazon.com hopes its fulfillment center workers are happy in their jobs. 
 
 But if they're not, and perhaps would rather be doing something else, Amazon has a deal: The company will pay them a bonus – up to $5,000 – to leave. 
 
 In a program that Amazon aptly calls "Pay to Quit," those who aren't committed to their jobs are urged to leave on their own, and can get $2,000 in severance pay in the first year of employment, with the bonus topping out at $5,000 in the fourth year. The company has several fulfillment centers in Tennessee, including large ones in Murfreesboro and Lebanon. 
 
 Related: Amazon hiring for 500 more positions in Murfreesboro, company announces in January 
 
 Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos explained the program in his 2013 Letter to Shareholders, released this week. 
 
 "Pay to Quit is pretty simple," he said. "Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it's for $2,000. Then it goes up $1,000 a year until it reaches $5,000." 
 
 Bezos noted that "The headline on the offer is 'Please Don't Take This Offer,'" adding: "We hope they don't take the offer; we want them to stay." 
 
 But why make such an offer at all? 
 
 "The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want," Bezos said in the letter. "In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don't want to be isn't healthy for the employee or the company." 
 
 More: New laws include Amazon sales tax collection 
 
 The program was started by Zappos.com, an Amazon subsidiary that sells shoes and other apparel, Bezos said. Amazon purchased Zappos in 2009 for $850 million. 
 
 Only workers in the fulfillment centers – where customer orders are packed and shipped – are eligible for the program, said Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Cheeseman. 
 
 "A small percentage of employees take the offer," she said. "We want them to stay, but we also only want people who want to be here. It encourages them to think about what they want." 
 
 Price boost: Amazon hikes Prime membership to $99 per year 
 
 Amazon also offers an education program, Career Choice, in which the company pre-pays 95 percent of the tuition for workers who want to "take courses for in-demand fields, such as airplane mechanic or nursing, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon," Bezos said in the shareholders' letter. 
 
 The goal of both programs "is to enable choice," he said. 
 
 "We know that for some of our fulfillment center employees, Amazon will be a career," he said. "For others, Amazon might be a stepping stone on the way to a job somewhere else – a job that may require new skills. If the right training can make the difference, we want to help." 
 
 The tuition program isn't limited to the fulfillment centers, Cheeseman said – it's open to all hourly employees at Amazon. 
 
 Reach G. Chambers Williams III at 615-259-8076 and on Twitter @gchambers3 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://tnne.ws/1gQGtqE ||||| Shira Ovide is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. She previously was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Read more opinion LISTEN TO ARTICLE 3:34 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email 
 
 The big numerical reveal on Wednesday was Amazon.com Inc. finally spilling the beans on the number of Prime members (more than 100 million). It also disclosed another number that shows how much it relies on an army of people moving physical merchandise around the world: $28,446. 
 
 That's the median annual compensation of Amazon employees. Amazon reported this number for the first time under a new requirement that companies disclose the gap between pay for the rank-and-file and the person in the corner office. (Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, reported total compensation of $1.68 million last year. As in prior years, he didn't take a stock bonus, collected a salary of $81,840 and had $1.6 million in personal security costs that Amazon covered.) 
 
 That median pay figure is skewed by the large number of Amazon's more than 560,000 employees who work in its package warehouses, distribution centers, Whole Foods grocery stores and other places far from the ping-pong tables, endless free kale chips and yoga rooms of Silicon Valley's rich tech campuses. Compare Amazon's median pay with Facebook Inc.'s $240,430. 
 
 Pay Check Amazon disclosed that its median worker compensation is $28,446, complying with a new law that requires companies to disclose the figure Sources: the companies' proxy filings 
 
 Just a reminder that this means half of Amazon's workers make more than $28,446, and half make less. The company doesn't have to disclose average pay, which would probably be skewed higher by the smaller number of Amazon's highly paid tech workers. In a statement, Amazon said its median pay figure includes people in more than 50 countries and part-time employees. The company also said it offers "highly competitive wage and benefits." (Full disclosure: I have a family member who works for a labor organization that advocates for higher worker pay.) 
 
 Amazon likes to boast about its prowess in job creation, and the company's workforce has exploded in recent years. Amazon is now the second-largest private employer in the U.S. behind Walmart Inc. In Bezos's annual letter to shareholders, also released on Wednesday, he again highlighted Amazon's investment in infrastructure and its ability to create jobs both directly and indirectly. 
 
 You're Hired Amazon's workforce is nearly four times the size it was three years ago, in part because the company absorbed about 89,000 employees from Whole Foods Source: Amazon 
 
 Bezos said Amazon directly created more than 130,000 jobs in 2017, not including people the company absorbed from acquired companies such as Whole Foods. That means Amazon brought on board more people in one year than the entire workforce of Google parent company Alphabet Inc., which said it had more than 80,000 employees at the end of last year. 
 
 "Our new jobs cover a wide range of professions, from artificial intelligence scientists to packaging specialists to fulfillment center associates," Bezos wrote. The company's median compensation figure, however, shows that at least by volume, Amazon's workforce tilts more toward the fulfillment center associates than AI specialists. 
 
 There's long been a debate about the quality of jobs at Amazon and whether cities and states should roll out the red carpet for Amazon to open package warehouses in their backyards. 
 
 Amazon's median pay works out to about $14 an hour, assuming a full-time worker at 52 weeks a year. That's a solid wage in many parts of the U.S. and not so much in other parts. For comparison, Target Corp. recently announced plans to pay at least $15 an hour by the end of 2020. Those people questioning the quality of Amazon's jobs just got a new data point for their critiques. 
 
 A version of this column originally appeared in Bloomberg's Fully Charged technology newsletter. You can sign up here. 
 
 ( Adds Amazon statement in the fourth paragraph. )
– Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sent out his annual letter to shareholders this week, and Business Insider takes note of one part in particular about the company's "Pay to Quit" program. Amazon offers some employees up to $5,000 to leave, and Bezos explains that the principle is "pretty simple": "Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is 'Please Don’t Take This Offer.' We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company." The Tennessean fills in some gaps: The offer is good only for employees in the company's "fulfillment centers"—the warehouses where all those online orders get packed and shipped. A spokeswoman tells the paper that only a "small percentage of employees take the offer." The Huffington Post, meanwhile, notes that many of those warehouse workers are part-timers, and it's unclear whether they would qualify for the deal. Still, it's an interesting idea, writes Max Nisen at Quartz, and it shows how Bezos isn't afraid to experiment to improve his workforce.