It may be common at luxury retailers like Nordstrom, but if you've ever waited in a customer service line to return something at a big box store, you know it's not easy. Try to imagine any other mass-market company willing to absorb such hassle and expense in the name of keeping customers happy. It was revolutionary when my wife and I first realized that, as Prime members, we could return almost anything we bought from Amazon, on the company's dime, simply by printing out a return label and slapping it on the box in which it arrived. Perhaps the most important core principle is putting the customer first. It outgrew the old VA hospital on Beacon Hill and transformed the landscape of Seattle, occupying more than 13 million square feet of office space and dominating the entire area south of downtown with modern new skyscrapers and a trio of glass spheres with an indoor tropical rainforest - a nice perk for workers in Seattle's dreary winters. Those are just the new projects we know about.Īlong the way, Amazon has become the second-largest employer in the U.S., with more than 750,000 full-time employees, mostly in its fulfillment centers and warehouses, up from less than 34,000 at the end of 2010. Alexa seemed to spring into the world fully formed, turning Apple's Siri into a legacy technology and leaving Google - the self-proclaimed artificial intelligence experts - playing catch-up.Īs the decade ends, Amazon has set its sights on online advertising, stealing market share and ad dollars from Google, and health care, creating panic inside pharmaceutical distribution and health insurance companies. That all served as a dress rehearsal for the release of an entirely new gadget: the home assistant. In hardware, Amazon was once confined to monochrome e-readers, before stumbling through a failed phone launch in 2014. (Like much lore, this is probably an exaggeration - Amazon consistently says AWS was a carefully considered new business built more or less from scratch.) The dramatic spikes in demand taught Amazon how to scale up functions in its own data centers, like computing power and data storage, and it considered offering similar capabilities to other businesses. According to local lore, the company stumbled into its cloud computing business by taking lessons it learned over the years during the holiday shipping season. People who worked there in the early 2000s talked about doing cutting-edge things with Linux and thinking in unusually creative ways about technical challenges. Outside Seattle, few people had heard of Prime - it now counts more than 100 million members.Īmong Seattle tech workers, Amazon had a reputation as an overgrown dot-com start-up, a place for maverick Type A personalities who didn't want to be part of the Microsoft Borg. My wife had signed up for an Amazon Prime membership to get a service (now discontinued) called Amazon Mom, which automatically delivered diapers and other supplies for new parents every month and increased the size of the diapers based on our daughter's presumed growth rate. It wasn't a daily habit, like Apple 's iPhone, Google 's search engine or even Facebook. There was another tech company in Seattle, but nobody paid it much attention.īack then, Amazon was like eBay or Craigslist - an important website you went to for a specific purpose. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit
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