The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

time. If Amazon could stay competitive on price, it could win the day on unlimited selection and on the convenience afforded to customers who didn’t have to get in the car to go to a store and wait in line.

“You could see the fact that he was getting feedback and taking it seriously,”

Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed

Bezos, Breier says, did not seem overly concerned with the depressing math behind America’s literary interests. He told Breier to organize the new Harvard Business School graduates into a “SWAT team” to research categories of products that had high SKUs (the number of potentially stockable items), were underrepresented in physical stores, and could

Bezos did not explicitly favor one group over the other, but he looked at the results of tests. Over time it became clear that the humans couldn’t compete. PEOPLE FORGET THAT JOHN HENRY DIED IN THE END, read a sign on the wall of the P13N office, a reference to the folktale of the steel driver who raced to dig a hole in competition with a steam-pow

When Doerr asked about the volume of daily transactions, Bezos leaned over a computer and typed a grep command next to a UNIX prompt, instantly pulling up the data—and demonstrating his technical fluency. Doerr swooned.

“Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

During one memorable meeting, Bezos reprimanded Lye and her colleagues in his customarily devastating way, telling them they were stupid and saying they should “come back in a week when you figure out what you’re doing.” Then he walked a few steps, froze in midstride as if something had suddenly occurred to him, wheeled around, and added, “But grea

The comment reflected his distinctive business philosophy. Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals’ investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible.