Three decades after its inception, it is difficult to understand the scale of Amazon.
Consider its vast warehouse in Dartford, outside London. It has millions of items in stock, hundreds of thousands of them purchased every day, and it takes two hours from the time something is ordered, the company says, for it to be picked, packed and shipped.
Now, imagine that scene and multiply it by 175. That’s how many “fulfillment centers,” as Amazon likes to call them, it has around the world.
Even if you think you can picture the endless tangle of packages zipping around the world, you need to remember something else: that’s just a fraction of what Amazon does.
It is also a major player among subscription streaming platforms (Amazon Prime Video); a market leader in home camera systems (Ring), smart speakers (Alexa), and tablets and e-readers (Kindle); hosts and maintains vast expanses of the internet (Amazon Web Services); and much more.
“It’s long been called ‘The Everything Store,’ but I think at this point Amazon is kind of ‘The Everything Company,’” says Bloomberg’s Amanda Mull.
“It’s so big and so ubiquitous and touches so many different parts of life that after a while, people take Amazon for granted in all kinds of everyday things,” he says.
Or, as the company itself once joked, pretty much the only way to get through a day without making Amazon rich in some way is to “live in a cave.”
“What the hell is left?”
So the story of Amazon, since it was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, has been one of explosive growth and continuous reinvention.
There has also been much criticism along the way for the “harsh” working conditions it applies to its workers and the taxes it pays.
But the main question as you enter your fourth decade seems to be: once you’re The Company of Everything, what do you do next?
Or as Sucharita Kodali, who analyzes Amazon for the research firm Forrester, puts it: “What the hell is left?”
“Once you have half a trillion dollars in revenue, how do you continue to grow at double digits year after year?”
One option is to try to tie together the threads between existing businesses: Amazon’s vast amounts of data on its Prime members could help it sell ads on its streaming service, which — like its rivals — is increasingly relying on commercials to generate revenue.
But there are limits: what benefits can Kuiper, its satellite division, or Whole Foods, its supermarket chain, bring?
To some extent, says Sucharita Kodali, the answer is to “keep tinkering” with new business ventures and not worry if they fail.
Just this week, Amazon phased out a line of business robots after just nine months.
Kodali says it’s just one of “a whole graveyard of bad ideas” the company tested and discarded to find the successful ones.
In the eye of regulators
But, he adds, Amazon may also need to focus on something else: the growing attention from regulators, who are asking tough questions, such as what it does with our data, what environmental impact it is having and whether it is simply too big.
All of these issues could prompt intervention “in the same way we pushed back on the monopolies that became giants in the early 20th century,” Kodali says.
For Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, its size poses another problem: the areas where his Western customers live simply can’t accommodate much more stuff.
“Our cities were not built to sustain many more deliveries of goods,” he tells the BBC.
That makes emerging economies such as India, Mexico and Brazil important. But, Kaziukėnas suggests, Amazon needs not just to enter the market, but to some extent to succeed.
“It’s crazy and maybe it shouldn’t be like this, but that’s a conversation for another day,” he says.
“The only threat to Amazon is something that doesn’t look like Amazon”
Amanda Mull points to another priority for Amazon in the coming years: staving off competition from Chinese rivals like Temu and Shein.
Amazon, he says, has “created the spending habits” of Western consumers by acting as a trusted intermediary between them and Chinese manufacturers, taking advantage of easy returns and ultra-fast deliveries.
But if it removes that last element from the deal, it could lower prices, as Chinese retailers have done.
“They’ve said, ‘Well, if you wait a week or 10 days for something you’re buying for fun, we can give it to you for next to nothing,’” Mull says — a proposition that’s appealing to many people, especially at a time when many consumers are facing a downturn in the cost of living.
Juozas Kaziukėnas is not so sure, suggesting that new retailers will remain “niche” and that something much more fundamental will be needed to challenge Amazon’s position.
“As long as shopping involves going to a search bar, Amazon has nailed it,” he says.
Thirty years ago, a startup spotted emerging trends around Internet usage and realized how they could change first retail, and then much more.
Kaziukėnas says that for this to happen again, a similar leap of imagination will be needed, perhaps around artificial intelligence.
“The only threat to Amazon is something that doesn’t look like Amazon,” he says.
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