Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer. The company was originally a book seller but has expanded to sell a wide variety of consumer goods and digital media as well as its own electronic devices, such as the Kindle e-book reader, Kindle Fire tablet and Fire TV, a streaming media adapter.
Amazon Web Services is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform. The first AWS offerings were launched in 2006 to provide online services for websites and client side applications. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service are the backbone of the company’s large and growing collection of Web services.
Jeff Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra in 1994 but changed the name to Amazon for the website launch in 1995. Bezos is said to have browsed a dictionary for a word beginning with “A” for the value of alphabetic placement. He selected the name Amazon because it was “exotic and different” and as a reference to his plan for the company’s size to reflect that of the Amazon River, one of the largest rivers in the world.
Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. The company has individual websites, software development centers, customer service centers and fulfillment centers in many locations around the world.
Bezos put customers first at the expense and sometimes to the dismay of his shareholders. Amazon went public in May 1997, bled money for the next six years, and barely eked out a profit for the decade after. To Bezos, those losses and other quarterly numbers mattered less than keeping prices low and customer service exceptional, so that the flywheel could keep on turning. Amazingly, Bezos eventually convinced Wall Street to mostly disregard his company’s lackluster quarterly earnings, too.
Amazon did $136 billion in sales in 2016. This year, sales on Prime Day, Amazon’s company-branded version of Black Friday, surpassed Amazon’s sales on either Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Amazon declared it the “biggest global shopping event in Amazon history.” The stock has done phenomenally well by any standard, and even more so considering the company still barely turns a profit. An investor who put $100 into Amazon’s IPO would have turned it into $ 63,990 on the company’s 20th anniversary this May.
Amazon is a logistics company
The secret to Amazon’s massive success in e-commerce is its endlessly complex logistics empire. Amazon promises two-day free shipping for all Prime customers and free two-hour “Prime Now” delivery in certain cities on more than 25,000 qualified items. It takes more than UPS and FedEx to make that happen.
At last count, Amazon’s delivery infrastructure included more than 180 warehouses, 28 sorting centers, 59 local package delivery stations, and 65 hubs for its two-hour Prime Now deliveries. Investment bank Piper Jaffray estimates that 44% of the US population lives within 20 miles of an Amazon warehouse or delivery station. Amazon’s proposed $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods could add another 431 distribution nodes in bougie neighborhoods to that network.
In 2013, the company reportedly started a shipping project called Dragon Boat, which would slowly take over all shipping and logistics direct from manufacturers in China and India to its customers across the United States. In addition to its delivery hubs, Amazon owns a fleet of more than 4,000 trucks and has reportedly leased more than 20 airplanes to ferry its customers’ packages across the country and between fulfillment centers. The company has mastered its growing shipping empire through analyzing the data from every package it’s ever shipped—the delivery of each package is algorithmically optimized for speed and efficiency of resources. In 2015, Amazon spent $11. 5 billion on shopping nearly double what it did the year before.
Of Amazon’s 382, 000 employees, Amazon says more than 90,000 work in the company’s US fulfillment centers. Testimonies from workers inside the centers paint a picture of a ruthless workplace driven by the demand for productivity above all else. Workers describe a point system, where every small infraction like tardiness or checking back in late from breaks are catalogued and count against them. Bathroom breaks were discouraged because they interfered with productivity. Employees are ranked and less-performing workers are let go.
Amazon is a moonshot factory
What’s a modern tech company without a few cash-burning moonshots? Operating in an industry where even the illusion of innovation is applauded—and any whiff of an innovation drought is cause for alarm Amazon lets its imagination run wild with ideas of drastically reinventing industries. What if there was a supermarket, but with no cashiers? What if your packages dropped from the sky?
Amazon can be credited with killing the physical bookstore, but could it reinvent the brick-and-mortar storefront for groceries? The company is currently running a beta test of Amazon Go, a store that uses cameras and sensors throughout the store to automatically track what a customer has picked out, and automatically charges them as they leave. It’s possible due to the drastic improvement in AI-driven object recognition, which allows Amazon software to autonomously detect and track a shopper throughout the store using multiple cameras. However, reports suggest the beta store has trouble keeping track of multiple people in the store. They’ll want to sort that one out.
Amazon is also working on reducing the friction between ordering a product and having it show up on your doorstep. It’s bought robotics companies to help automate its workflow and runs competitions aiming to make robots better at sorting items for shipping. It’s also developing autonomous drones to fly smaller items to Prime customers in under 30 minutes. US regulations prohibit autonomous drones flying beyond the line of sight of a human pilot, so Amazon has been doing the bulk of its testing in the UK, and in December, delivered its first order to an actual customer in the Cambridgeshire countryside. The company hasn’t given a hard date on when it might start rolling out this service more broadly—there are air-traffic management issues to be worked out at national levels—but it has patents and plans for all sorts of self-piloting vehicles delivering you goods in the future, including self driving trucks , hives of drones, and some sort of ditigible that can ship out packages on demand.
Even if Amazon’s moonshots never come to fruition, it’s great optics for the company. A reimagined grocery store makes you think of Amazon’s dedication to getting food to you faster (maybe you’ll be inspired to try Amazon Fresh, the company’s grocery delivery service), and if Bezos is willing to invent new kinds of drones to get you a package faster, imagine how much they want you to get that toothpaste you ordered to be delivered through the standard mail.
Is Amazon a monopoly?
Amazon’s proposed $13.7 billion acquisition of of Whole Foods reignited concerns that the Everything Store has become a monopoly. Amazon is a brutal competitor but it has so far largely evaded antitrust scrutiny because in crippling competing businesses, it has also made life better for consumers.
When Amazon entered the ebook market in the late 2000s, Bezos priced bestsellers at $9.99 , a significant discount to what new hardcover books typically sold for. The tactic drove customers away from traditional publishers and helped Amazon gain a controlling share of online book sales. When the US government later scrutinized Amazon as part of a price-fixing case against Apple and the “big six” book publishers, it characterized Amazon’s behavior as “los{s-leading” rather than “predatory,” noting that Amazon’s overall ebook business was profitable.
It happened similarly with diapers. In 2009, Amazon sought to acquire Quidsi, a fast-growing e-commerce startup whose brands included Diapers.com, Soap.com, and BeautyBar.com. After Quidsi rebuffed Amazon, Bezos’s company cut prices for diapers and other baby products by up to 30%. A year later Amazon debuted Amazon Mom, a service with a year of free two-day delivery, as well as additional “subscribe and save” discounting on diapers. Quidsi theorized that Amazon would lose $100 million on the efforts but it didn’t matter; Amazon’s target on Quidsi spooked the startup’s investors and ate into Diapers.com’s growth.
In November 2010, Quidsi sold to Amazon for $540 million. The Federal Trade Commission determined the deal was not anticompetitive. In 2011, Amazon stopped taking new members to Amazon Mom. In 2012, it aggressively reduced discounts on baby products.
In a January 2017 note for the Yale Law Journal, technology and antitrust researcher Lina Khan argued that Amazon’s customer-first policies have allowed it to escape antitrust scrutiny, even as it consolidates control over ever-more industries. Antitrust is a complex matter that requires establishing the market in question and with Amazon, which in theory competes against all retail and more, that is never a simple question.
One of Amazon’s key weapons in defeating competitors is its ultra-low prices. In recent decades, regulators have shied away from declaring this sort of pricing anticompetitive, assuming instead that the market is a natural check that prevents companies from dropping prices to unsustainable levels. But if Amazon has made one thing clear over its 20-year career, it’s that it doesn’t fear losses or subscribe to the usual market logic.
