Amazon at 30: what’s next for The Everything Company?

Three decades on from the day it began, the scale of the Amazon is hard to navigate.

Consider his huge warehouse in Dartford, on the outskirts of London. It has millions of items in stock, hundreds of thousands of which are purchased every day — and from the time something is ordered, it takes, the company says, two hours to pick, pack and send it on its way.

Now picture that scene and multiply it by 175. That’s the number of “fulfillment centers,” as Amazon likes to call them, that it has around the world.

Even if you think you can imagine that endless blur of land criss-crossing the globe, you have to remember something else: that’s just a fraction of what Amazon does.

It is also a major streamer and media company (Amazon Prime Video); market leader in home camera systems (Ring) and smart speakers (Alexa) and tablets and e-readers (Kindle); hosts and supports large areas of the Internet (Amazon Web Services); and much more besides.

“For a long time it was called ‘The Everything Store,’ but I think at this point Amazon is kind of ‘The Everything Company,'” Bloomberg’s Amanda Mull tells me.

“It’s so big and so ubiquitous and touches so many different parts of life that after a while people take the existence of the Amazon in all kinds of elements of everyday life for granted,” he says.

Or, as the company itself once quipped, basically the only way to get through the day without making Amazon rich in some way was to “live in a cave.”

So the story of Amazon, since its founding by Jeff Bezos in 1994, has been one of explosive growth and constant rebirth.

But the big question as it enters its fourth decade seems to be: once you’re The Everything Company, what do you do next?

Or as Sucharita Kodali, who analyzes Amazon for the research firm Forrester, puts it: “What the hell is left?”

“Once you hit half a trillion dollars in sales, which they already are, how do you continue to do double-digit year-over-year growth?”

One possibility is to try to tie the threads between existing businesses: the vast amount of shopping data Amazon has for its Prime members can help it sell ads on its streaming service, which — like its competitors — is increasingly turning to ad revenue .

But that only goes so far – what benefits can Kuiper, its satellite division, bring to Whole Foods, its supermarket chain?

To some extent, says Sucharita Kodali, the answer is to “keep moving” in new business ventures and not worry if they fail.

Just this week, Amazon killed off a series of trading bots after just nine months – Ms Kodali says it’s just one of “a whole graveyard of bad ideas” the company has tried and discarded to find successful ones.

But he says Amazon may have to focus on something else: growing regulatory scrutiny, asking tough questions like what is it doing with our data, what’s its environmental impact, and is it just too big?

All of these issues could prompt an intervention “in the same way that we abolished the monopolies that became behemoths in the early 20th century”, Ms Kodali says.

For Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, its size presents another problem: the places where his Western customers live simply cannot take much more stuff.

“Our cities weren’t built for much more delivery,” says the BBC.

This makes emerging economies such as India, Mexico and Brazil important. But, Mr. Kaziukėnas suggests, Amazon doesn’t just need to enter the market, it needs to dominate it to some extent.

“It’s crazy and maybe it shouldn’t be — but that’s a conversation for another day,” he says.

Amanda Mull points to another priority for Amazon in the coming years: fending off competition from Chinese rivals like Temu and Shein.

Amazon says it has “created the spending habits” of Western consumers by acting as a trusted intermediary between them and Chinese manufacturers, crediting it with easy returns and facilitating fast delivery.

But remove the last element of the deal and you can cut prices, as Chinese retailers have done.

“They said ‘well, if we can wait a week or 10 days for something you’re buying right now, we can give it to you almost for free,'” says Ms Mull – a proposition that many find attractive. people, especially during the cost of living crisis.

Juozas Kaziukėnas isn’t so sure, suggesting the new retailers will remain “niche” and challenging Amazon’s position will require something much more fundamental.

“As long as shopping means going to a search box — Amazon has done that,” he says.

Thirty years ago, a start-up company noticed new trends in Internet usage and realized how it could revolutionize first retail and then much more.

Mr Kaziukėnas says it will take a similar leap in imagination, perhaps around AI, to make it happen again.

“The only threat to Amazon is something that doesn’t look like Amazon,” he says.