This program gives them some control over when someone is likely to quit. I.e. not in the middle of a holiday rush.
Another way to look at this that doesn't require any cognitive dissonance is that Amazon lets hourly employees accumulate up to 2-3 months of severance pay (I'm not sure how much time that represents because I don't know their hourly rates, but I'm guessing it averages out to something like $12/hour).
I think it's a great program. Besides offering a friendly incentive for unmotivated workers to leave; it improves the confidence of those working there and provides useful transitional assistance to those moving on for career reasons; lower-paid workers often suffer economic disruption even when moving to a better job because they may miss a pay cycle or have to take on new expenses (new work equipment, different clothes, a car or moving to another town), so a cash cushion for such things is a big plus. It's good cheap publicity for Amazon, not to mention they probably retain their ex-employees and their associates as future customers.
The obvious solution to fix this flaw in the system would be to raise the offer daily instead of annually, be approximately $1000/365 =~ $2.74 per day. Or more simply by $20 per week, which comes out to about the same per year ($1040).
Of course it's likely employees would wait e.g. 3 months to get the "quitting bonus". In fact, jordn quite clearly stated that also, in the first line of his comment.
Then if you hate your job and you're close to that specified time it's in your interest to wait, even though the point of the policy is that Amazon would rather that you quit.
If they just increased the offer with more granularity they wouldn't create that conflict of interest. You'd only get more money as a function of the time you stayed on the job, so you might as well quit right away instead of waiting a few months for a much larger payout.
Right, or did I miss something?
Seems like a great outcome for both the employee and the employer.
But I doubt you'd have people staying in a job they dislike for another year just to get an extra $1k when they do quit. Also you'll have compounded another year of turning down cash to work there so the cognitive dissonance might be even stronger.