Amazon founder Jeff Bezos speaks at an event launching Kindle 2.0 in 2009. Bezos founded the company 30 years ago, on July 5, 1995, in his garage in Bellevue, Washington.
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[Editor’s note: Amazon is among NPR’s financial supporters and pays to distribute NPR content.]
Thirty years ago today, Jeff Bezos founded his online bookstore in his garage.
The company that Bezos eventually named Amazon is now one of the largest companies on the planet and one of the few to have a market capitalization of $2 trillion.
Alina Selyuk covers the company for NPR's Business Desk, and she spoke with NPR's Andrew Mambo about how Amazon has gobbled up so much of the internet and become a “jack of all trades.”
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Andrew Mambo: So let’s talk about the man who started it all: Jeff Bezos. What was he doing in 1994?
Alina Selyuk: Bezos was a Wall Street investment banker who was serious about jumping on the dot-com bandwagon. Picture a guy with thinning hair, wearing khaki pants, driving a Honda. He was a very modest guy, but very driven and focused. The other name he came up with for the company was actually relentless.com. If you type relentless.com, it still redirects you to Amazon.com.
Bezos wanted to create a one-stop shop, and he did just that.
Mambo: It's worth reminding people – Amazon started out only selling books.
Seryukh: Yes. He started with books because they are relatively cheap, durable, and easy to ship, plus there are millions of books available, so he can sell a lot of titles.
Mambo: So how did it go from a bookseller to a global e-commerce giant?
Seryukh: Well, Amazon has acquired many other companies, including software, robotics, and grocery stores. Amazon has had a long history of dominating sales taxes. As an online retailer, Amazon did not collect sales tax in most of the country for nearly 20 years. Amazon also reinvested all of its money back into Amazon. Amazon has famously posted losses for years without any pressure from investors.
And Amazon created revolutionary products like the Kindle e-reader and smart speakers, and it made some pretty innovative business decisions, like opening up its marketplace to small businesses, and today the vast majority of products sold on Amazon are sold by these small businesses.
So Amazon started focusing on two-day and same-day shipping, started charging a membership fee for it, and now has enough members in Amazon Prime to cover the size of the eighth-largest country on earth.
Mambo: There has also been a lot of coverage in recent years about the harsh working conditions in Amazon warehouses. What is the human cost of building a company like Amazon?
Seryukh: Amazon is currently the second-largest private employer in the United States after Walmart, and the company relies on 1.5 million workers, most of whom work in warehouses and distribution centers packing and shipping products, making minimum wage or just above it, and doing hard, physical work.
This marks a new chapter in Amazon's history: the union push. Amazon has been very aggressive in fighting unionism. So far, one warehouse in New York has actually unionized, but two years later, Amazon has still not recognized the union.
Mambo: So where is Amazon now? What happens next now that it has become a major player in a variety of industries?
Seryukh: Amazon is celebrating its 30th anniversary and it's feeling a little creaky at the knees and a little bloated — in fact, it's grown so much during the pandemic that it's now downsizing some of its warehouses.
I think there is one big technological challenge for Amazon, which is catching up to the AI race. But really looking at the bigger picture, Amazon is facing a federal anti-monopoly lawsuit that could (only in theory) try to break up the company. The lawsuit accuses Amazon of choking its rivals and actually raising costs for both sellers and buyers in the long run. But the lawsuit will take years to resolve.
Some sellers are pushing back against Amazon's fees and restrictions, and some workers are pushing back against the speed and conditions.
But the main defense Amazon has had all this time is that customers trust and love the brand, so it will be interesting to see how Amazon maintains that trust – can it stave off fake reviews, counterfeit products, price gouging and search frustrations, and stay ahead of the competition?
