'They Wouldn't Let Me Anywhere Near Customers' – Jeff Bezos Cracked 300 Eggs A Shift Working At McDonald's During His 'Acned Teenager Stage'

Jeff Bezos built Amazon into a customer-obsessed empire, where everything revolves around delivering what people want – fast, efficiently and sometimes even before they realize they need it. Ironically, his first real job didn't exactly scream "customer service prodigy."

As a teenager, Bezos worked at McDonald's in Miami, but instead of handling the register or greeting customers, he was swiftly exiled to the back of the kitchen. Why? He was, in his own words, in his "acned-teenager stage."

"They wouldn't let me anywhere near the customers," Bezos told Fast Company in a 2001 interview. "They were like, ‘Hmm, why don't you work in the back?'"

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Instead of flipping burgers or taking orders, Bezos was stationed on egg duty. And not just a few eggs here and there – he was cracking hundreds of them every shift. "The first thing I would do is get a big bowl and crack 300 eggs into it," he said. 

But like any good entrepreneur, he found a way to turn it into a game. "One of the things that's really fun about working at McDonald's is to get really fast at all of this stuff. See how many eggs you can crack in a period of time and still not get any shell in them."

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It's a little funny to think that one of the world's richest men, known for revolutionizing e-commerce, got his start in a fast-food kitchen, perfecting the art of one-handed egg cracking. But even then, he was picking up skills – speed, efficiency and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to improve processes.

Of course, Bezos' philosophy on customer service evolved well beyond his McDonald's days. In his 1997 shareholder letter, he made it clear: "Obsess over customers." Nearly two decades later, in his 2016 letter, he doubled down on that principle.

"There are many ways to center a business," Bezos wrote. "You can be competitor-focused, you can be product-focused, you can be technology-focused, you can be business model-focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality."

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According to Bezos, customers are "always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied." Even when they think they're happy, they still want something better. That belief fueled Amazon's innovations, from one-click shopping to Prime memberships – things customers didn't even know they needed but quickly couldn't live without.

So, while McDonald's may have kept Bezos away from the front counter, his knack for efficiency and problem-solving clearly stuck. Turns out, cracking eggs at record speed was just a warm-up for disrupting entire industries.

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