Yes, no doubt the supervisor(s) feared that if they let it happen their job would be on the line. But how warranted was that fear? Would Bezos actually fly up to YXU and personally fire the management team over a worker sitting in their car? Or was it completely imagined?

From my unattached outsider's perspective, I am almost certain Bezos would do no such thing. In fact, it is almost guaranteed that he would have never known about it, assuming it would have saved this person's life. In my experience with small business, I wouldn't even be able to keep track if any of the workers there were sitting in a car during a fire drill unless I watched it happen. There is no way someone in a business of millions of people is keeping such tabs.

I can appreciate the imagining, though. I'm guilty of such things myself, finding out later the person I thought would draw ire wasn't thinking about me at all. I'm not sure that is cultural. It seems to be a basic human trait. In fact, our culture tries to remind people that nobody is thinking about you.