[cavisne]

Amazon is the second most trusted institution in the USA, behind the military.

It's fairly obvious how the above "draconian" conditions benefit customers. Employees that take long breaks or pick items slowly leads to delayed deliveries, having to employee more staff per delivery, having to raise prices or reduce range to cover this cost.

This is really the flip side of "customer obsessed", when you are focused on customers you don't particularly care about any individual employee (all the way up the chain).

For a counterexample, google and facebook mostly treat their employees well (with the exception of some contractors). However customers don't trust them as much, because they know they are profit/employee focused.