Online retailer Zappos recently started paying employees up to $1500 to quit the company during initial training sessions. Is this just a PR stunt? Are they crazy?

The bottom line is that satisfied and happy employees provide great customer service. As a customer, who wants to deal with an unhappy employee? It affects the overall customer experience. I think this is a great idea for Zappos or for any other company to weed out employees who could potentially affect the customer experience in a negative way.

For instance, let’s say that I am a satisfied and loyal Zappos customer that spends on average $250/ year at Zappos.com. This means over the next 25 years I will spend $6,250. One day I get on the phone with an unsatisfied employee that really pisses me off. Because of this negative experience, I stop purchasing from Zappos. That’s $6,250 worth of potential revenue lost. How about if the unsatisfied employee pisses off four other similar customers in one month? Zappos will lose $31,250 worth of potential revenue just because one employee created a negative experience for five customers. Imagine if you had a couple more unsatisfied employees and they piss off at least 5 customers a month. You do the math. If you think $1,500 is too much to weed out unsatisfied employees think again.

A survey conducted by Elle magazine in fall 2007 reveals that women are still fashionably shopping even though gas prices and energy costs continue to increase. The shopper survey was based on a composite scale of price sensitivity and annual expenditures

Researchers identify the “recession-proof shopper” as a woman who is at the median age of 29 with a median household income of $62,000.

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