Having "success" be the metric is a very slippery slope.
They have terrible retention. One of the worst and in many years the absolute worst.
A few years back workers were passing out from working in 100 degree temps. They were disciplined for performance and instead of installing air conditioning, they lined up ambulances and paramedics to take falling bodies to the hospital. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-ver...
This is grotesque.
For their core engineering, BD etc... teams in Seattle, retention is great.
Low skill, yes, low pay, God yes, seasonal - not usually. At least where I am, they aggressively hire for full time positions, and clearly intend for non-temporary employees to consider it as a career. Retention is poor because of the environment and the workload.
And theft. Apparently there's a lot of theft. But that's bound to happen when you surround people with expensive merchandise, work them like dogs and refuse to pay them a decent wage.
This is pretty good rant from the technical\engineering side: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
There is no need to fetishize amazon and if amazon is your model I feel sorry for your employees.
The counterargument is that of course the things which makes Amazon's work culture toxic to people are orthogonal to their success and not a cause of it. My former boss was very well aware that she could sometimes be downright mean and nasty to our staff, and I cringed every time she justified it by citing what people thought the same of Steve Jobs: While true, we can't avoid the fundamental problem of causal inference, and there is no saying that had Jeff been actively striving to make a more welcoming culture, or if Steve or my former boss were nice people, that they wouldn't have experienced even greater success.