Amazon at 30: What next for 'The Everything Company'?

theblownews

Three decades on from the day it began, it is hard to get your head around the scale of Amazon.
Consider its vast warehouse in Dartford, on the outskirts of London. It has millions of stock items, with hundreds of thousands of them bought every day - and it takes two hours from the moment something is ordered, the company says, for it to be picked, packed and sent on its way.
Now, picture that scene and multiply it by 175. That's the number of "fulfilment centres", as Amazon likes to call them, that it has around the world.
Even if you think you can visualise that never-ending blur of parcels crisscrossing the globe, you need to remember something else: that's just a fraction of what Amazon does.
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It is also a major streamer and media company (Amazon Prime Video); a market leader in home camera systems (Ring) and smart speakers (Alexa) and tablets and e-readers (Kindle); it hosts and supports vast swathes of the internet (Amazon Web Services); and much more besides.
"For a long time it has been called 'The Everything Store', but I think, at this point, Amazon is sort of 'The Everything Company'," Bloomberg's Amanda Mull tells me.
"It's so large and so omnipresent and touches so many different parts of life, that after a while, people sort of take Amazon's existence in all kinds of elements of daily life sort of as a given," she says.
Or, as the company itself once joked, pretty much the only way you could get though a day without enriching Amazon in some way was by "living in a cave".

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