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An employee loads a truck at the Amazon.com Inc. fulfillment center in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. on Monday, Dec. 2, 2013.

(David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

If the only thing keeping you from quitting your job is the thought going without an income until you find your next job, Amazon has a solution.

In his annual letter to shareholders Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced yesterday that the company had adopted a Pay to Quit policy. You can read a copy of the letter here, on the Securities and Exchange Commission's website. Once a year employees will be offered money — the amount varies based on years with the company — to quit their jobs. The offer starts at $2,000 and goes up by $1,000 every year and tops off at $5,000.

"We hope they don't take the offer; we want them to stay," Bezos wrote in the letter. "The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don't want to be isn't healthy for the employee or the company."

It's an idea Bezos borrowed from online shoe retailer Zappos, which became an Amazon subsidiary in 2009 when it was acquired in an all-stock deal worth about $1.2 billion. At the Las Vegas-based Zappos, the program goes by the name The Offer. Over the years Zappos has sweetened the offer, raising the amount from $100 to one month worth of an employee's salary.

Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company, wrote a column about the policy for Harvard Business Review. He said he thinks the Pay to Quit policy can be effective at removing unhappy people from the companies that offer them.

"In a sense, Pay to Quit is an annual performance review of the company by its employees: Can I imagine not working in this department, with these people, for this company?," he writes. "It is they who are making the call, they who are choosing not to take the money and run — which creates a deeper sense of engagement and affiliation."

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