As I was about to publish my first Engadget article, I was working at an independent bookstore in Los Angeles with my newly minted English degree. In seemingly unrelated news, Amazon just reported its first profitable year since switching from selling books to selling “everything” four years ago. (It still sells a lot of books.)
Our bookstores do a good job of keeping a balanced inventory on their shelves, with more valuable popular titles as well as smaller, better items. But we can’t carry every book a customer might want, so we offer to order any book in print. It takes about a week to get in if the publisher has it, longer if we have to go through the publisher. This seems fine to most customers.
But sometimes “about a week” is too long. A few people just came out and said, “No, I’ll order on Amazon.” In 2005, Amazon launched its Prime membership program, which gives customers unlimited two-day shipping on most orders for $79 a year. At launch, CEO Jeff Bezos called it “‘unlimited’ delivery.” No one knew at the time how hungry the world was for the convenience of the Amazon brand. Now, nearly two decades later, we’re already seeing a shift in adapting to the buffet—in workforce, retail, and the entire customer experience.
Prime didn’t become famous overnight. It is estimated that six years after its introduction, only 4 million households have paid for the service. But 10 years later, in 2021, Bezos claimed to have accumulated 200 million members worldwide. Amazon has not disclosed membership numbers beyond this milestone, but the number is likely higher now.
Free and fast shipping has become an expectation, and no company has done more to change the logistics landscape than Amazon. The company itself operates more than a hundred warehouses in the United States, each ranging from 600,000 to 4 million square feet. Each robot employs 1,000 to 1,500 people, and an army of some 750,000 robots work alongside humans in many places.
The company operates a fleet of cargo planes, is experimenting with drone deliveries, and has deployed thousands of delivery vans — although none of these Amazon-branded vans are driven by actual employees. Instead, independent companies called delivery service partners (DSPs) subcontract drivers to operate the vans. Amazon has 1.5 million full- or part-time employees (1 million of them in the United States), but those numbers don’t include independent contractors and temporary workers. In addition to the DSP program, Amazon Flex allows individuals to use their own cars to deliver smile-printed packages to their doorsteps. The company also outsources deliveries to traditional providers while relying on UPS and the U.S. Postal Service, which it has forced to deliver packages on Sundays since 2013.
Such a large-scale coordinated effort to deliver Stanley Quenchers and Acne Patch faster than anyone else has, has paid off. However, it’s hard to see growth and revenue numbers without factoring in labor costs. Contracted drivers peed in bottles because they didn’t have time to use the toilet after hitting their quota. Worker inside automated warehouse seriously injured. The company is being sued for retaliatory firings, intrusive employee surveillance practices and failure to follow coronavirus safety guidelines. According to the advocacy group National COSH, Amazon once again made the “dirty” list of workplace safety in 2023. While the company has taken steps to make improvements and offer better pay, it has taken anti-union action typical of large companies, joining others in calling the National Labor Relations Board “unconstitutional.”
In addition to worker issues, Amazon’s dominance has made life more difficult for retail businesses, especially large chains. The Amazon effect has become synonymous with the mall-emptying squeeze caused by e-commerce on traditional retail. Even businesses that partnered with Amazon were underperforming. Third-party sellers on the site are subject to punitive measures and have to deal with ever-increasing fees, which sometimes lead to them going bankrupt.who is the seller Do People who performed well saw products copied and sold under Amazon’s private label. Famous partnerships have produced dismal results, such as when Borders outsourced its early online sales or its exclusivity with Toys R Us. Of course, Borders no longer exists, and Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017.
There’s no point trying to beat Amazon on speed and price. It would be unwise to join them. So retailers compete in other ways. At bookstores, we focus on our strengths: having a diverse, accomplished staff who can judge our customers’ reading tastes and put a great book into their hands. If someone walked into our bookstore circa 2005 and said they were addicted to fantasy novels, there’s a good chance our book buyers would have handed them a copy of George R.R. Martin’s latest book, And this was years before HBO had anything to do with the book.
We have a curated Magazine section and host live events with best-selling authors, cult magazine founders, and local authors. But mostly we’re tapping into people who want more from the shopping experience than just speed and convenience, who don’t mind spending a week getting a book as long as it has a local small community. Some people just wanted to sit under a tree (there was a tree in the middle of the store) browse books, pet a cat (in my day, that was Lucy) and listen to a playlist that we thought was pretty evil.
Today, Skylight Books remains a force of creativity and energy in the Los Feliz community and has even expanded into an outbuilding next door. Overall, after the retail apocalypse and the initial losses from the coronavirus pandemic, independent bookstores are doing well, with established bookstores remaining intact and new stores opening. Elsewhere in the retail sector, large chains continue to close stores, but the independent sector appears to be growing. Personally, I love the new bakeries, brewpubs, and bulk stores popping up around the neighborhood where I live now.
As a business writer, I can’t ignore that a big part of my job is directing readers to Amazon.com. The company plays a big role in displaying the text you’re reading, as Engadget’s site is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) through Yahoo’s cloud partnership. The company is one of the world’s largest companies and the second-largest employer in the United States, with a significant portion of every retail dollar spent in the United States going into Amazon’s revenue pool.
Amazon has done well in the physical retail sector by acquiring more than 500 Whole Foods stores. However, when the company tries to create other retail experiences, it often doesn’t win. Amazon Books, Amazon Style, and Amazon Four Stars are all small retail spaces that seek to leverage Amazon’s brand, vast amounts of customer data, and cutting-edge retail technology. At its peak, the stores had about 70 brick-and-mortar locations, but all are now closed. Cashier-less Amazon Go still has more than 20 stores in the United States, but Amazon closed nine of them in 2023 and has not announced plans to open more stores.
Statistically speaking, these missteps are probably inevitable. More than half of new businesses go bankrupt before they are 10 years old. But perhaps these stores failed because, as physical spaces, they couldn’t take advantage of Amazon’s main advantage: zero-effort purchases. Shopping on Amazon’s website isn’t particularly pleasant. The website is cluttered and confusing. Questionable products and fake reviews erode shopper trust. It’s not even the cheapest place to shop. But 1-Click™ Buy Buttons and Turbo Delivery allow things to show up at our doorsteps like sliding on greased rails.
Yet when people find the courage to leave their homes, they may want something more: a human experience created by people from their own communities out of passion, not because market data says there is money in a particular industry. With a multi-trillion dollar valuation, Amazon isn’t going anywhere, but in its massive shadow there’s still room for businesses that focus on the human element of business transactions, where people might spend some time enjoying Amazon’s speed And convenience may have saved them.
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