The Everything Store

The Everything Store is the closest biographical documentation of the unprecedented rise of Amazon as an online retail store with an almost infinite amount of choice, based on over 300 interviews with current and former Amazon employees and executives, family members of the founder and the hard facts available to the public.

Amazon started with books. Initially, that’s all they sold. But they made sure it was the best book buying experience you could possibly have.

When publishers told them not to let people publicly review the books, they did so anyway, because they knew it’d help customers decide. People were worried about Amazon then letting individuals sell their used books and products on the platform themselves, but that too helped customers make the best choice.

What’s more, because tracking customer behavior is so easy online, you always seem to get the perfect product recommendations, another experience Amazon strives to optimize relentlessly.

It is sure no bold claim to put “Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.” into your mission statement, but that’s exactly what Amazon’s reads, and it’s the key ingredient for their success.

Fun fact: Sam Walton, founder of the past century’s retail giant Walmart had the exact same philosophy – everything for the customer.

Jeff Bezos personally supports a project building a gigantic clock underground in Texas, which will run for 10,000 years. The arms of the clock will tick away centuries and millennia, providing visitors with a completely new perspective on time.

Bezos is a huge proponent of long-term thinking and he wants to spread the message. He’s shown it again and again with his business decisions as well. In order to be everywhere, Amazon had to build many service centers and a massive infrastructure, which cost a lot of money. The red numbers year in and year out worried investors, but Bezos knew that being the world’s first universal online retailer was a license to print money – and he was right.

Similarly, when ebooks first made their debut, Amazon paid full print copy price, but sold all ebooks for $9.99, thus losing around $5 per book on average. But eventually, publishers had to lower their prices too, but by then Amazon had long been the go-to marketplace for ebooks, which helped them reach billion dollar revenue territory.

Whether in life or in business, don’t focus so much on the short-term, whether it’s the week, the month, or even the year. Know that what you’re doing will have an impact 10, 20 years later and base your actions on that and you’ll trade short-term wins for long-lasting success.