Earlier this week President Obama paid a visit to Amazon’s immense distribution center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The president praised, among other things, Amazon’s unique Career Choice tuition assistance program, which is available to all full-time Amazon employees, as well as Amazon’s job creation – Amazon had announced just a few days earlier plans to hire up to an additional 7000 workers across the country. But President Obama’s support for Amazon has brought howls of outrage from independent book stores and their trade organizations.

Amazon today announced their new “Amazon Career Choice” program which is, in fact, a tuition assistance program. Actually, it most closely resembles the old G.I. Bill that the military used to offer, whereby if you spent four years in the military, the government would pay up to a certain amount for up to 4 years of college (the payment would go directly to you so long as you were in school full time). In the case of the Amazon Career Choice tuition assistance, an Amazon employee (“Amazon Associate”) who has been with Amazon for at least three years, can get up to 95% of their tuition paid for qualifying academic programs.