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The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone (Goodreads Author)

3.96 · Rating Details · 15,527 Ratings · 1,165 Reviews

The definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos.

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenienc ...more

Hardcover, 341 pages

Published October 15th 2013 by Little, Brown and Company

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Jan 08, 2014 Tim rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: business

I had heard scuttlebutt that the book was hostile to Amazon. I didn't find that to be the case at all. In fact, it increased my admiration for Jeff and what he and his team have accomplished.

To be sure, it is incomplete and doubtless has many inaccuracies, but it gives insight into the mind of a remarkable man and the company he has built - a company with profound influence on the present and future shape of our society.

After Steve Jobs died, everyone was saying "Will we ever see his like again? ...more

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Mar 11, 2014 La Petite Américaine rated it it was ok

Shelves: meh-whatever, biography, auto-bios-etc

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is perfect for a specific group of people: job-seekers.

If you're currently looking for work, pick up a copy of this book, as it does convey a very important message. That is, never work at Amazon. And no, that message is not just for prospective employees who are thinking of braving the Jungle-esque conditions of the distribution centers. The message is for anyone thinking of joining any part of the company: never work at Amazon.

If you're n ...more

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Nov 20, 2013 Mal Warwick rated it really liked it

WHY I HATE AMAZONLCOM

I confess: I read this book on my Kindle — my eighth Kindle, no less! — and of course I bought the book from Amazon.com. As I have practically every other book I’ve read over the past eight or ten years. And I have to admit that I’ve bought lots of other stuff from the company over the years, including some really expensive items. Not so much because of the low prices, though I hardly object to them, as because of One-Click ordering, Amazon Prime, and the exceptionally good WHY I HATE AMAZONLCOM

I confess: I read this book on my Kindle — my eighth Kindle, no less! — and of course I bought the book from Amazon.com. As I have practically every other book I’ve read over the past eight or ten years. And I have to admit that I’ve bought lots of other stuff from the company over the years, including some really expensive items. Not so much because of the low prices, though I hardly object to them, as because of One-Click ordering, Amazon Prime, and the exceptionally good customer service

So, why do I carry with me like a massive weight on my shoulders a festering hatred for the company and for the pile-driving founder who has built it into the behemoth it is today?

Read Brad Stone’s revealing book, The Everything Store, and you’ll understand perfectly why that weight on my shoulders is so heavy.

Take Amazon’s employees, for example. Not only does Jeff Bezos have a long history of verbal abuse directed at his employees — including senior executives who work closely with him — but he treats as a matter of principle denying them such modest benefits as free snacks and full reimbursement for using public transportation that are common in so many other large companies. In other words, he’s a skinflint. Bezos uses the excuse that he’s saving money to be able to offer customers the lowest possible prices. Somehow, though, his personal wealth keeps climbing. It’s now at $27 billion, according to Forbes. You’d think maybe he could afford to show a little appreciation for the people working for him.

Then there are the suppliers. You know about book publishers, of course. You’ve probably seen your own neighborhood bookstore go out of business in recent years. Amazon wasn’t the sole cause, but it’s right up there at the top of the list. But it’s not just book publishers that Bezos treats with contempt. Stone includes an eye-opening account of the troubled relationship between Amazon and the prestigious German knife manufacturer, Wusthof. In order to gain access to Amazon’s seemingly unlimited customer base, the German firm is forced to run the risk that it will be put out of business by Amazon’s ugly habit of promoting cut-price suppliers of its own products. Why? Apparently because Jeff Bezos acts as though his libertarian creed requires him to defy not just any government-imposed limitations but rules or customs adopted by anyone else at all.

No doubt Jeff Bezos loves his wife and kids and is affectionate toward furry little animals as well. Maybe his close friends even like him. But both his reputation and Brad Stone’s deeply researched account suggest that he is a thoroughly despicable CEO.

Brad Stone follows the leading technology companies for Bloomberg Businessweek. The Everything Store is his second book.

...more

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Oct 15, 2013 Jennifer (aka EM) marked it as to-read

I really want to read this. I'm not kidding; this is not a protest review, or a thinly veiled taunt for deletion so as to provide fodder for the Hydra. That ship has sailed for me, and I find myself today starting to contemplate my own next steps vis-a-vis my increasingly tenuous participation on this site. And yet here I still am.

I want to understand what is happening, and why, to the goodreads that I love. There are not too many (are there?) who would disagree that a key, if not the key, is in ...more

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Jun 26, 2014 Bob Mayer rated it it was amazing

Amazon is both “missionary and mercenary” and is a line from Brad Stone, the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. That to me sums this book up.

Given recent events, aka Hachette-Amazon, it’s required reading for anyone involved in the publishing industry. I think Amazon customers should also read it.

Also, I suggest reading the reviews written by some of the people mentioned in the book, including Mr. Bezos wife. But only after reading the book.

I’m a bit surprised at ...more

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Dec 17, 2013 Suzanne rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, read-in-2013

I placed my first book order at Amazon in 1999. I was living in Ann Arbor at the time, within walking distance of the flagship Borders store. Because new books were expensive, I mostly shopped at a used book store down the street instead. The selection was unpredictable, but I loved browsing their overflowing shelves and finding titles that were harder to track down, either because they were old or out of print.

Amazon's selection certainly wowed me, and there were times that I did want a new bo I placed my first book order at Amazon in 1999. I was living in Ann Arbor at the time, within walking distance of the flagship Borders store. Because new books were expensive, I mostly shopped at a used book store down the street instead. The selection was unpredictable, but I loved browsing their overflowing shelves and finding titles that were harder to track down, either because they were old or out of print.

Amazon's selection certainly wowed me, and there were times that I did want a new book instead of one with a faded cover and cracked spine. Their prices on new books were significantly cheaper than Borders, ordering was easy, and shipping was reliable. Back then, putting your credit card info into a website still felt risky. Would you ever get what you paid for? There wasn't a strong precedence yet. (I remember a friend describing Netflix to me and actually saying something like, "I wouldn't trust that. Sounds like a rip-off." Of course we joined a few years later when it took off.) But, Amazon always delivered. Although I still bought quite a few used books, whenever I needed new ones, Amazon became my go-to source.

Some of my other early transactions with Amazon (which I can still view on the site!) were in the form of gift cards for family members. This remains a staple in my family's gift-giving even today. In fact, if money is passed along for anything, an Amazon gift certificate is preferable to a personal check, because we all spend money at Amazon so regularly. We are Kindle users and Prime members. In shopping online, Amazon's prices, selection, and convenience are unbeatable.

So, given my long history with Amazon, I really loved the first half of this book. It was fascinating to learn how all their services came about, what inspired them, and how Bezos's insistence that the customer experience always came first (even if it meant temporary company losses) informed all his decisions. Amazon molded my expectations when it comes to dealing with internet retail. (Seriously, I recently bought some gift cards for a family member from another site and was so surprised that I couldn't choose the date of delivery of an e-mail gift card!)

Of course even in those early days of Amazon, when they were the underdogs working tirelessly in the name of the consumer experience, there was some ugliness. Amazon has never sounded like a pleasant place to work, whether you were in the boardroom or the warehouse. Work/family balance was frowned upon and the business trumped personal relationships in every instance. The stories of Bezos's strategies for dealing with other businesses were eye-opening, as well. The more successful Amazon became and the more capital it had to play with, the more aggressive its tactics. In recent years, it has been tantamount to bullying.

These tactics are not unique to Amazon. We all like small businesses until they become big businesses, and it's partly because we know what it takes to get there (and stay there). Low prices at high volume are simply not sustainable for mom-and-pop brick and mortar stores. And then there's the issue of keeping up with the changing times and desires of the customers. This was the nail in Borders' coffin, and in a way, Amazon did to Borders what Borders did to a lot of the smaller booksellers. (Happily, my favorite used book store still remains in business right down the street from the now defunct Borders flagship store. I do miss Borders as a presence, though I admit I bought from them rarely.)

Amazon has tried hard to seem cool in all this, but as they work toward Bezos's dream of becoming the one-stop shop for absolutely everything, dipping their finger into every pot, it gets more difficult to root for them. With everyone, it seems they'll eventually hit a sore spot. For me, it was the acquisition of Goodreads. At first, I assumed they'd done so because books were the core of Amazon from the beginning, yet the reviews over there are pretty much a joke. I don't trust them, I don't read them. They are pointless.

After reading this book, however, I get the impression the Goodreads acquisition was less about the reviews themselves and more about the data, which can be applied directly to their recommendation algorithms. Those algorithms are Amazon's bread and butter. They're using your book ratings right now to make those "if you bought X, maybe you'd like Y" recommendations, promoting impulse buys and offering gift suggestions. Such algorithms (also based on past purchases and searches at Amazon) are incredibly powerful, and Amazon has even tweaked them artificially to leverage deals with suppliers. If someone wasn't playing ball, Amazon altered the algorithm so the supplier's products no longer came up, and some felt a sales loss of 40%. Of course Amazon lost some money, too, but they weren't losing their shirts the way the suppliers were. Ultimately, in that game, Amazon always wins.

I know I'm contributing to the problem. Low prices, convenience, and the perception of a personal touch due to their targeted marketing... it all somehow keeps me there. All the money I've ever given them helped them buy GoodReads, and now my reviews are helping them, too. For some reason, I don't hate them enough to stop. And, at what cost to the retail world, book publishing, and everything else that Amazon takes on? In considering that, this book made me feel a bit dirty, but I do think it's better to know. If you're a diehard fan of Amazon, you may not enjoy the last third of this book very much. If you're already on the fence, you may never shop there again.

But, that's not why I docked it a star. It's a minor point, but this book did something I dislike in nonfic when authors are trying to generate suspense. They offer a tantalizing teaser at the beginning of a chapter, followed by tangentially connected thing that I don't care about, and then finally conclude with the good stuff I really wanted to read. I don't think this narrative manipulation is necessary, but I see it often in books like this.

Despite those lulls, I thought this was an interesting and evenhanded look at Amazon's history, from inception to today. I honestly didn't think I could find a book about business so interesting. Just ask my husband -- I couldn't STFU about this one while I was reading it. I can't wait until he gets home so I can tell him I finished it. (Hi, honey!) ...more

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Nov 19, 2013 Grumpus rated it really liked it

Shelves: biography, audiobook

The professional Jeff Bezos (pronounced BAY-zohs not BEE-zohs) is a hard-ass, bad-ass, or a superlative-free just plain ass. I’m not judging, just sayin’. It’s all perspective. If you are an employee or competitor, watch out. If you are a customer, you can count on an advocate with an obsession for customer service and getting the lowest prices anywhere.

Like today’s political environment, my impression of Amazon (no longer Amazon.com) is that it is polarized—people either love or hate the compan ...more

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Oct 28, 2013 Suzanne rated it really liked it

The cover of this book is actually a pretty good visual summary of what you find inside: a great look at Amazon and Jeff Bezos but with the real man (frustratingly) only coming through in part. While Jeff Bezos gave his support to the book, he didn't participate in the way that Steve Jobs did with Walter Isaacson's book. And it shows. So, for that reason, the book doesn't accomplish its goal of being "the definitive book" of Amazon.

Also, I found the book jumped around a lot so I'd sometimes won ...more

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Oct 15, 2013 Jonathan Leblang rated it really liked it

I found the book interesting and informative, to see how an outsider views both Jeff and Amazon. Of course, as with any book where the subject is not an active participant, the book is slanted toward those episodes where Stone can find someone to talk about them. And of course, he includes that which supports his thesis.

I found the discussion about his biological father to be sensationalistic -- and unnecessarily intrusive to Jeff's family (both his real family and his biological father's family ...more

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Oct 22, 2013 Nathan rated it really liked it

Shelves: business

There's an art to writing the business biography. This one couldn't figure out whether it was the Bezos story or the Amazon story, even though the two are intertwined, and didn't do an entirely perfect job of either. Amazon's very early startup days were short on detail, whereas the more proximal later ultra-competitive years were well described. Bezos's personality is explored but not charted. A book that opens as many questions as it answers.

What it does paint, though, is fascinating. Jeff Bez There's an art to writing the business biography. This one couldn't figure out whether it was the Bezos story or the Amazon story, even though the two are intertwined, and didn't do an entirely perfect job of either. Amazon's very early startup days were short on detail, whereas the more proximal later ultra-competitive years were well described. Bezos's personality is explored but not charted. A book that opens as many questions as it answers.

What it does paint, though, is fascinating. Jeff Bezos as driven over-achiever. Amazon as dysfunctional incarnation of Jeff's own personality.

An hilarious fail: Sony Electronics explored the possibility of using Amazon to bring its Sony Style chain online. As part of the discussions, Howard Stringer, chief of Sony Corporation of America, toured the Amazon fulfillment center in Fernley and, in a memorable moment, encountered on the warehouse floor a pile of Sony merchandise, which Amazon was technically not supposed to be selling. Stringer and his colleagues started examining the labels and writing down product numbers in an attempt to determine where the merchandise had come from. That deal didn’t happen either.

On the Amazon values and culture:

They agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation.

At least one anointed bar raiser would participate in every interview process and would have the power to veto a candidate who did not meet the goal of raising the company’s overall hiring bar. Even the hiring manager was unable to override a bar raiser’s veto. “Many companies as they grow begin to compromise their standards in order to fill their resource needs,” says Dalzell. “We wanted to make sure that did not happen at Amazon.”

At the same time, rising investor skepticism and the pleadings of nervous senior executives finally convinced Bezos to shift gears. Instead of Get Big Fast, the company adopted a new operating mantra: Get Our House in Order. The watchwords were discipline, efficiency, and eliminating waste.

When both teams met for the first time, Bezos made a big show of keeping one chair open at the conference-room table, “for the customer,” he explained.

Jeff slammed his hand on the table and said, ‘That is not how an owner thinks!'

Amazon executives reasoned that day that they had the Internet’s most authoritative product catalog and that they should exploit it. That, it turned out, was the central insight that not only turned Amazon into a thriving platform for small online merchants but powers a good deal of its success today.

“Jeff was super clear from the beginning,” says Neil Roseman. “If somebody else can sell it cheaper than us, we should let them and figure out how they are able to do it.”

“There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop,”

Bezos learned a lot from Walmart. Scott also talked about how Walmart viewed advertising and pricing as two ends on the same spectrum. “We spend only forty basis points on marketing. Go look at our shareholder statement,” he said. “Most of that goes to newspapers to inform people about what is in our stores. The rest of our marketing dollars we pour into reducing prices. Our marketing strategy is our pricing strategy, which is everyday low pricing.”

“You can fill Safeco Field with the people that don’t want to sell to us,” Sinegal said. “But over a period of time, we generate enough business and prove we are a good customer and pay our bills and keep our promises. Then they say, ‘Why the hell am I not doing business with these guys. I gotta be stupid. They are a great form of distribution.’

“My approach has always been that value trumps everything,” Sinegal continued. “The reason people are prepared to come to our strange places to shop is that we have value. We deliver on that value constantly. There are no annuities in this business.”

The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems. They would likely compete with one another for resources and sometimes duplicate their efforts, replicating the Darwinian realities of surviving in nature. Freed from the constraints of intracompany communication, Bezos hoped, these loosely coupled teams could move faster and get features to customers quicker.
Each team would propose its own “fitness function”—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity. For example, a two-pizza team in charge of sending advertising e-mails to customers might choose for its fitness function the rate at which these messages were opened multiplied by the average order size those e-mails generated. A group writing software code for the fulfillment centers might home in on decreasing the cost of shipping each type of product and reducing the time that elapsed between a customer’s making a purchase and the item leaving the FC in a truck. Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team’s evolution.
The result was somewhat disappointing. The two-pizza-team concept took root first in engineering, where it was backed by Rick Dalzell, and over the course of several years, it was somewhat inconsistently applied through the rest of the company. There was just no reason to organize some departments, such as legal and finance, in this way.

As part of his ongoing quest for a better allocation of his own time, he decreed that he would no longer have one-on-one meetings with his subordinates. These meetings tended to be filled with trivial updates and political distractions, rather than problem solving and brainstorming. Even today, Bezos rarely meets alone with an individual colleague.

“PowerPoint is a very imprecise communication mechanism,” says Jeff Holden, Bezos’s former D. E. Shaw colleague, who by that point had joined the S Team. “It is fantastically easy to hide between bullet points. You are never forced to express your thoughts completely.” Bezos announced that employees could no longer use such corporate crutches and would have to write their presentations in prose, in what he called narratives. The S Team debated with him over the wisdom of scrapping PowerPoint but Bezos insisted. He wanted people thinking deeply and taking the time to express their thoughts cogently.

Japanese consultants occasionally came to work with Amazon, and they were so unimpressed and derogatory that Amazon employees gave them a nickname: the insultants.

Perhaps the best story stems from the busy holiday season of 2006. A temporary employee in the Coffeyville, Kansas, fulfillment center showed up at the start of his shift and left at the end of it, but strangely, he was not logging any actual work in the hours in between. Amazon’s time clocks were not yet linked to the system that tracked productivity, so the discrepancy went unnoticed for at least a week. Finally someone uncovered the scheme. The worker had surreptitiously tunneled out a cavern inside an eight-foot-tall pile of empty wooden pallets in a far corner of the fulfillment center. Inside, completely blocked from view, he had created a cozy den.

But it's not all smiling HBR quotables. During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn’t take that well. “The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority,” he answered bluntly. “That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can’t excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you.”

“There can be only one head of marketing at Amazon, and his name is Jeff,”

“If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.”

“I spent most of my time trying to hide from Bezos,” Pinkham says. “He was a fun guy to talk to but you did not want to be his pet project. He would love it to distraction.”

For the launch of Simple Storage Service, Atlas had commemorative T-shirts made up for his colleagues; he used the design of Superman’s costume but with an S3 rather than an S on the chest. Naturally, he had to pay for the shirts himself.

Bezos never despaired over the mass exodus. One of his gifts, his colleagues said, was being able to drive and motivate his employees without getting overly attached to them personally.

Bezos did not explicitly favor one group over the other, but he looked at the results of tests. Over time it became clear that the humans couldn’t compete. PEOPLE FORGET THAT JOHN HENRY DIED IN THE END, read a sign on the wall of the P13N [Personalisation] office.

“Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

Google and Microsoft, which spread out their stock grants evenly, Amazon backloads the grant toward the end of the four-year period. Employees typically get 5 percent of their shares at the end of their first year, 15 percent their second year, and then 20 percent every six months over the final two years. Ensuing grants vest over two years and are also backloaded, to ensure that employees keep working hard and are never inclined to coast. Managers in departments of fifty people or more are required to “top-grade” their subordinates along a curve and must dismiss the least effective performers. As a result of this ongoing examination, many Amazon employees live in perpetual fear. A common experience among Amazon workers is a feeling of genuine surprise when one receives a good performance review.

At a management offsite in the late 1990s, a team of well-intentioned junior executives stood up before the company’s top brass and gave a presentation on a problem indigenous to all large organizations: the difficulty of coordinating far-flung divisions. The junior executives recommended a variety of different techniques to foster cross-group dialogue and afterward seemed proud of their own ingenuity. Then Jeff Bezos, his face red and the blood vessel in his forehead pulsing, spoke up. “I understand what you’re saying, but you are completely wrong,” he said. “Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”

At that meeting and in public speeches afterward, Bezos vowed to run Amazon with an emphasis on decentralization and independent decision-making. “A hierarchy isn’t responsive enough to change,” he said. “I’m still trying to get people to do occasionally what I ask. And if I was successful, maybe we wouldn’t have the right kind of company.”

Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them.

Or, as Neil Roseman also put it: “Autonomous working units are good. Things to manage working units are bad.”

The deals and negotiations and business strategies are equally fascinating. Wilke started his negotiations with UPS that summer in Louisville, ahead of a September 1 contract deadline. When UPS was predictably obstinate about deviating from its standard rate card, Wilke threatened to walk. UPS officials thought he was bluffing. Wilke called Jones in Seattle and said, “Bruce, turn them off.” “In twelve hours, they went from millions of pieces [from Amazon] a day to a couple a day,” says Jones, who flew to Fernley to watch the fallout. The standoff lasted seventy-two hours and went unnoticed by customers and other outsiders.

The Amazon jewelry executives decided on an approach similar to the one the company had recently used for its cautious first foray into apparel. They would let other, more experienced retailers sell everything on the site via Amazon’s Marketplace, and Amazon would take a commission. Meanwhile, the company could watch and learn. “That was something we did quite well,” says Randy Miller. “If you don’t know anything about the business, launch it through the Marketplace, bring retailers in, watch what they do and what they sell, understand it, and then get into it.”

Amazon devised one of the Web’s first automated search-ad-buying systems, naming it Urubamba, after a river in Peru, a tributary of the Amazon. But Bezos was wary of helping Google develop tools that it might then extend to Amazon’s rivals. “Treat Google like a mountain. You can climb the mountain, but you can’t move it,” he told Blake Scholl, the young developer in charge of Urubamba. “Use them, but don’t make them smarter.”

the institutional no, by which he meant any and all signs of internal resistance to these unorthodox moves. Even strong companies, he said, tended to reflexively push back against moves in unusual directions. At quarterly board meetings, he asked each director to share an example of the institutional no from his or her own past. Bezos was preparing his overseers to approve what would be a series of improbable, expensive, and risky bets. He simply refused to accept Amazon’s fate as an unexciting and marginally profitable online retailer. “There’s only one way out of this predicament,” he said repeatedly to employees during this time, “and that is to invent our way out.”

"You have to start somewhere,” he said. “You climb the top of the first tiny hill and from there you see the next hill.”

Amazon keeps AWS’s financial performance and profitability a secret, analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate that in 2012, it brought in $2.2 billion in revenue.

As Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: “Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.”

Bezos directed groups of engineers in brainstorming possible primitives. Storage, bandwidth, messaging, payments, and processing all made the list. In an informal way—as if the company didn’t quite know the insight around primitives was an extraordinary one—Amazon then started building teams to develop the services described on that list.

investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn’t want to repeat “Steve Jobs’s mistake” of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.

Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading device, Bezos told him, “You are basically already late.”

The company had finally learned the tricks of the century-old trade that is modern retail. Profit margin is finite. Better financial terms with suppliers translate directly into a healthier bottom line—and create the foundation on which everyday low prices become possible.

The next few months were tense. Amazon’s inducements to publishers were followed by threats. Publishers that didn’t digitize enough of their catalogs, or didn’t do it fast enough, were told they faced losing their prominence in Amazon’s search results and in its recommendations to customers.

marveling at how Bezos had ruthlessly engineered another acquisition by driving his target off a cliff. Says one observer who had a seat close to the battle, “They have an absolute willingness to torch the landscape around them to emerge the winner.”

Manufacturers are not allowed to enforce retail prices for their products. But they can decide which retailers to sell to, and one way they wield that power is by setting price floors with a tool called MAP, or minimum advertised price. MAP requires offline retailers like Walmart to stay above a certain price threshold in their circulars and newspaper ads. Online retailers have a higher burden. Their product pages are considered advertisements, so they have to set their promoted prices at or above MAP or else face the manufacturer’s wrath and risk the firm’s limiting the number of products allocated or withdrawing them altogether.
Like Sam Walton, Bezos sees it as his company’s mission to drive inefficiencies out of the supply chain and deliver the lowest possible price to its customers. Amazon executives view MAPs and similar techniques as the last vestiges of an old way of doing business, gimmicks that inefficient companies use to protect their bloated margins. Amazon has come up with countless workarounds, including a technique called hide the price. In some cases, when Amazon breaks MAP, it doesn’t list the price on its product page. A customer can see the low price only when he places the item in his shopping cart.

Some of the retailers who sell via the Amazon Marketplace seem to have a schizophrenic relationship with the company, particularly if they have no unique and sustainable selling point, such as an exclusive on a particular product. Amazon closely monitors what they sell, notices any briskly selling items, and often starts selling those products itself.

Amazon’s own employees have compared third-party selling on the site to heroin addiction—sellers get a sudden euphoric rush and a lingering high as sales explode, then progress to addiction and self-destruction when Amazon starts gutting the sellers’ margins and undercutting them on price.

introduced [...] the Prime Lending Library, which allowed Prime members who owned a Kindle reading device to borrow one digital book a month for free. But Amazon included the books of many mid-tier publishers in its lending catalog without asking for permission, reasoning that it had purchased those books at wholesale and thus believed it could set any retail price it wished (including, in this case, zero).

[reverse-engineering what makes cool companies] Rudeness is not cool. Defeating tiny guys is not cool. Close-following is not cool. Young is cool. Risk taking is cool. Winning is cool. Polite is cool. Defeating bigger, unsympathetic guys is cool. Inventing is cool. Explorers are cool. Conquerors are not cool. Obsessing over competitors is not cool. Empowering others is cool. Capturing all the value only for the company is not cool. Leadership is cool. Conviction is cool. Straightforwardness is cool. Pandering to the crowd is not cool. Hypocrisy is not cool. Authenticity is cool. Thinking big is cool. The unexpected is cool. Missionaries are cool. Mercenaries are not cool.

When you have fit yourself snugly into Jeff Bezos’s worldview and then evaluated both the success and failures of Amazon over the past two decades, the future of the company becomes easy to predict. The answer to almost every conceivable question is yes. ...more

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Nov 08, 2013 Jorrit Van der Meulen rated it liked it

very fast read - having lived many of the situations. i don't think the portrayal of jeff was near balanced enough. he is relentless in his customer obsession and that's at the cornerstone of everything. i have been in uncomfortable meetings with him. but, i cannot hoestly say that i have ever been in unfair meetings with him. when i did things or led things that made that vein on his forhead pop out, in the end, it was pretty apparent in hindsight (for me) that i'd amde a mistake. so, he was ri ...more

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May 19, 2015 Jess rated it liked it

Shelves: 2015-books

Ah yes. The book that launched a bitter and brutal flame war between Hachette and Amazon.com. How could I not read it?

I have to say, it took me awhile to realize what Jeff Bezos's problem was with the book. Because, well... from everything else I've read about Amazon, this shit is accurate. Don't like being characterized as a perfectionist, demanding, dictatorial genius? Then don't be one, Jeff Bezos. Don't like having your company's methods of skirting around established trade laws become know Ah yes. The book that launched a bitter and brutal flame war between Hachette and Amazon.com. How could I not read it?

I have to say, it took me awhile to realize what Jeff Bezos's problem was with the book. Because, well... from everything else I've read about Amazon, this shit is accurate. Don't like being characterized as a perfectionist, demanding, dictatorial genius? Then don't be one, Jeff Bezos. Don't like having your company's methods of skirting around established trade laws become known to the wider public? Then don't act like the rules are meant to be broken, Amazon. But nobody likes to be seen as the bad guy, so I get it.

That's just the thing though: Amazon doesn't come off as the bad guy. I read this whole thing and wouldn't characterize the company as any more evil or tyrannical than any other large, bajillion dollar American company. In fact, their motivations are almost noble at times, and their vision so far-sighted as to be practically inscrutable. Nobody knows what Amazon's end-game is (aside from Jeff Bezos perhaps), and I seriously doubt we'll find out within my lifetime. As a book publishing professional it almost pains me to say, but I'm not sure Amazon is evil anymore. Self-interested, certainly. But not necessarily the monster I've always took it for.

There was one thing in the book that I thought was worthy of raising Bezos's ire. The author tracked down Bezos's birth father--the guy who knocked up Bezos's mom when they were both teenagers and like many teenage fathers tried his best to stick around before leaving out of fear and a sense of inadequacy--who had no fucking idea his son was one of the richest men in the country. The author found this man, told him who his son was, and then facilitated contact between the birth father and Bezos. Which is AN INCREDIBLY FUCKED UP THING TO DO. Seriously, dafuq was this asshole of an author thinking? How dare he presume to stick his nose in the personal lives of both Bezos and his birth father? What an invasive, rude, manipulative, hurtful, insensitive thing he has done. From the book, it sounds like Bezos has a very warm, close relationship with his stepfather (who is, for all intents and purposes up to and including their shared last name, his father) and had no wish to contact his biological father.

So characterizations of Amazon and its business practices aside, I don't fucking blame Jeff Bezos for trying to destroy this book, its author, and its publisher. There was ABSOLUTELY NO NEED for Stone to track down Bezos's biological father. This part of the book made me question all of his research practices in preparing for the book. For if he is that tone-deaf to social propriety, what does that say about his information-gathering ethics? What does that say about his perceptions of the culture inside Amazon? It says a whole lot about Brad Stone as a person (read: he's a shitty fucking person).

So yes, I learned a lot about the brief, meteoric rise of Amazon through the pages of this book. But contrary to the majority of reviews and Bezos's own perception of the book, it actually made me more sympathetic to Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos than before I read it. ...more

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Jun 23, 2014 Benjamin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: tech, non-fiction

Overall I did enjoy this book. The question of accuracy really can't be answered by anyone besides the Man himself (not even his wife, I'd say). It paints a more detailed picture of Amazon, it's people, and the challenges it faced (with some mentions of its current and future issues) than any other book. If you're going to read one book about Amazon, I would probably recommend this one over One Click Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com, mainly because Stone paints a much bigger picture here th ...more

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Apr 02, 2016 Cristina Vega rated it did not like it · review of another edition

LA PEOR TRADUCCION QUE HE LEÍDO EN MI VIDA!!!!!

Si alguien busca un ejemplo de como no traducir, este se lleva las 5 estrellas. Una obra de arte en sí misma que describe el horror de no entender lo que se traduce.

PD: El original en inglés es un muy buen libro si se quiere entender cómo Amazon llegó a ser lo que es. Compre el original, en español es una porquería.

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Oct 29, 2014 Emily rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: business, micro-history

This was an illuminating look at the growth of Amazon - I have too many highlights to count! It seems like Brad Stone wrote the best, most accurate book he could, given the fact that he couldn't interview Bezos himself. Even if a few of the early facts are wrong, like MacKenzie Bezos says in her Amazon review, I still feel like I got a picture of the beginnings and early culture of Amazon, and how that developed into the culture and structure that we exist in today.

I had no idea that eBay was c ...more

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Oct 18, 2013 Brendan Fortuner rated it really liked it

This is the best book about Amazon/Jeff on the market (of 2 or 3 others). As a current employee, much of what's inside rings true. My only criticism is that the frenetic back and forth in time within each chapter was a bit disorienting (though arguably similar to the work environment here). I also agree with Jeff when he says "it's too early to reflect." This book takes you to the seventh inning in a close game that could suddenly turn either way. Someone will have to write the follow up. Perhap ...more

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Mar 25, 2016 Cher rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: bookclub, nonfiction

4 stars - It was great. I loved it.

I think Jeff is one of the most capable and effective founders ever, and I think the Amazon juggernaut is still in its early stages. ~Joy Covey

Overall a fascinating story of the determined underdog coming out on top. While it does get bogged down in a few places with excessive technical or legal details, this was a really engaging read. I particularly found the more personal stories around Bezos to be fascinating and thoroughly enjoyed learning more about the b ...more

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Jul 01, 2015 Amr rated it liked it

Shelves: tech, business, biography, nonfiction, internet

This book is as much about Jeff Bezos as it's about Amazon. In a sense, Amazon is Jeff Bezos. It's shaped in his goals and style. This is good if you're (like me) are used to the Jeff Bezos you saw in product launches and interviews; smart, awkward, and nerdy. However, in this book, you get to meet another Jeff Bezos; bottom-line, cut-throat, wall-street type.
I've read about a lot of tech company leaders and this is the one I was surprised the most when I knew more about him.
The book offers a lo ...more

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Apr 19, 2014 Florence rated it really liked it

Amazon sounds like a hellish place to work. Controntation is encouraged, concensus is frowned upon. Employees come and go with astonishing frequency. Pay is low. Jeff Bezos, the founder and visionary of the company is a tyrant who loves to publicly humiliate his employees, implying that they are lazy or stupid. Yet Bezos is a billionaire and there is nothing our society values more than wealth. The company itself seems ethically challenged. They consciously attempt to drive competitors out of bu ...more

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Oct 26, 2013 Rebecca rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction

It's obvious that Jeff Bezos aided and abetted this book to be written, and why not? Just like Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and other innovative entrepreneurs of this age, Bezos is brilliant, fearless, ruthless, and maniacal about his creation, Amazon.com. Working at Amazon, however, is *not like* working at Google right up the road: rampant conflict, confrontation, draconian frugality and in some cases, criticism to the point of employees experiencing post traumatic stress disorder. Bezos believe ...more

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Oct 27, 2013 André Gomes rated it really liked it

Shelves: entrepreneurship, biography

I’ve learned that amazon's marketing strategy is its pricing strategy which is every day lower prices, aldo that they don't profit by selling things, but by helping customers to make better purchase decisions. Those are experiences that I have as a customer of AWS, and its was a great experience to learn more about the culture of this awesome company.

Steve Jobs interests defined Apple strategy (music/iTunes) as well as Jeff Bezzos interests defined Amazon strategy (books/Kindle).
Steve loved musi ...more

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Nov 16, 2015 Davy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

In the same vein of reading books a year after most of my friends do, I decided to picked this up. Ironically, I got a kick when they talked about how Kindle started up, while reading on a Kindle myself. I can't speak to the portrayal of Jeff B as others have on the Amazon book review, but I think after finishing the book, I am at awe at how far he has taken Amazon and admire his drive and tenacity.

I especially enjoyed the lore and telling of how alot of the current Amazon principles and proces ...more

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Aug 31, 2015 Ira rated it liked it

I picked this book up a few weeks ago while staying a close friends' house and was immediately hooked. I do not read a lot of business history books so I cannot assess where this book fits in the genre as far as writing. Overall, it was written fluidly and serviceably, thought I found that some of the attempts to divide up chapters were a bit choppy, particularly towards the end.

However, I am a dyed in the wool Amazon-prime junkie that uses it for media, has multiple kindle devices, uses Amazon ...more

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May 27, 2016 Ben Sanchez rated it it was ok

Quick and simple, this was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Getting to know the beginnings of the Amazon empire was fascinating and I am glad I know some of these facts now, but overall I found this hard to get through. I found myself getting frustrated at Jeff for the things he did and the horrible ways he treated his employees and had trouble going forward with the book. This is definitely not a company I would ever consider working for simply because they expect your life to be Ama ...more

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May 12, 2014 Michael rated it liked it

Shelves: other-non-fiction

The Everything Store is a business-journalism take on Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. It's well done--there's nothing groundbreaking, but Brad Stone writes well and the story itself is pretty fascinating.

Bezos is a larger than life character: brilliant, passionate to the point of being a secular evangelist about his business, and lacking in social niceties. He isn't fun to work for; he's a perfectionist who will become irate over tiny errors, and who thinks work-life balance is something empl The Everything Store is a business-journalism take on Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. It's well done--there's nothing groundbreaking, but Brad Stone writes well and the story itself is pretty fascinating.

Bezos is a larger than life character: brilliant, passionate to the point of being a secular evangelist about his business, and lacking in social niceties. He isn't fun to work for; he's a perfectionist who will become irate over tiny errors, and who thinks work-life balance is something employees of other companies should be interested in. Similarly, the company he runs isn't fun to partner with: Stone collects stories of retailers (e.g., booksellers, small suppliers) getting squeezed mercilessly by Amazon.

However, the flip side of the two sentences above is that it is great to be an Amazon customer. Bezos neglects profits, and is obsessed with lowering consumer prices. (In fact, Amazon's financials led Slate's economist Matthew Yglesias to riff "Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.")

In the bad-for-employees-and-suppliers-but-great-for-consumers sense, Amazon's mirror image would appear to be its retailer rival Wal-Mart, not its high-tech competitors. Amazon's besieged workers are just not as visible as Wal-Mart's: Amazon's are in warehouses, away from the eyes of its customers. There, Amazon's anti-union tactics and low wages escape public attention. Its high-tech workers are much better paid, but many are also unhappy, frustrated by long hours and a lack of amenities. In this vein Amazon exemplifies the concerns with 21st century big business, namely a disregard of stakeholders (especially employees) and the destruction of small, local businesses (with roots in the community leading to an unwillingness to ignore stakeholders). On a more positive note, Stone's book also highlights the benefits of constantly searching for ways to solve customers' (or potential customers') problems: Amazon Web Services ended up becoming a huge part of Amazon's business, and has actually reduced start up costs for small companies, thus potentially ameliorating some of the problems Amazon's bigness creates.

...more

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Oct 26, 2013 Seth Fiegerman rated it really liked it

This is by far the most comprehensive look at the history and culture of Amazon, a secretive tech company not unlike Apple. It also serves as the closest thing to an official biography of its founder Jeff Bezos, which is a shame because it seems there is so much more still left to be written about him.

As Brad Stone explains, the idea for Amazon came while Bezos was working at a computer-driven hedge fund in New York. He and his boss brainstormed different business ideas that revolved around the This is by far the most comprehensive look at the history and culture of Amazon, a secretive tech company not unlike Apple. It also serves as the closest thing to an official biography of its founder Jeff Bezos, which is a shame because it seems there is so much more still left to be written about him.

As Brad Stone explains, the idea for Amazon came while Bezos was working at a computer-driven hedge fund in New York. He and his boss brainstormed different business ideas that revolved around the potential of the Internet. One of those ideas gave birth to Juno, an early Internet provider; another idea was for "the everything store." The latter essentially suggested that one Internet company could become the gate keeper to all purchases online and reap the rewards.

Bezos took the latter idea for himself and spent the next 20 years pushing his way into new product categories, sometimes battling and subduing competitors, sometimes battling and subduing his own staff. What's striking in reading the book is how many times Bezos's initial plans don't pan out -- Amazon failed to launch an auction competitor to eBay, struggled to get into jewelry, gave up on a product similar to Google Street View, etc. At one point, frustrated execs at the company privately tallied up Bezos's failures and successes and found the former to significantly surpass the latter. But all along, Bezos is portrayed as someone focused on the long view and undeterred by setbacks.

My only real complaint as a reader and reporter is that most quotes about Bezos (and the company) come off as overly laudatory. There's no doubt that he's an impressive figure but he's also an incredibly divisive one both inside and outside the company and I was surprised not to see more voices to that effect. I worry too that some will look at this book and try to emulate Bezos's brash I-know-best managerial style much in the same way that some did after reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. It's important to remember that the success of Amazon was not a foregone conclusion just because of Bezos and indeed, his style of rapid, almost reckless expansion nearly bankrupted the company after the dot com bust, were it not for an exec securing a bond sale.

Still, he is clearly a visionary and a towering force in tech and it's about time someone tells his story. Hopefully he will eventually sit down for a proper biography, but it may be awhile. As Bezos would probably say, it's still early. ...more

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Nov 09, 2013 Brian rated it really liked it

(4.0) Impressed.

I was quite impressed with this book, coming from a journalist who had to walk a fine line given that he worked closely with Amazon's PR/spokespeople (well, not sure he had much choice there). I think he gives a good picture of Amazon's history, what makes it such a successful company and how Bezos has driven so much of what makes Amazon Amazon.

I have no way to assess the reported inaccuracies of Amazon's history (much has been discussed in reviews written by the insiders on amaz ...more

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May 02, 2016 Anton Solomonik rated it really liked it

A gripping story of logistics and business. It talks about the underlying economic reality of things that, I feel like, most people aren't aware of or don't want to be aware of. I wish the prose were not so bland; I wish the narrator did more to emphasize the darkness and drama of the story. My favorite part is where they anger the German knife manufacturer, " with wavy, white hair and an avuncular smile, [who] has quite possibly never in his life been photographed without a sharp blade in his h ...more

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May 27, 2014 Vigants Lesausks rated it it was amazing

This was one great pageturner. Have read it in just 2 evenings and I am really impressed by the contents. I believe it is very close to true in most episodes.

Book shows quite a bit of corporate culture in one of largest companies in the world. I personally have worked for Microsoft for several yars and see many of things really hapening inside the companies. I was very enjoing reading about heartless aquisition tactics for big companies and those winner take it all aproaches.

Book has quite some ...more

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Nov 04, 2013 Christopher Campbell rated it really liked it

The everything store is now also selling its own Kool-Aid! 384 pages of it. But, that's not a bad thing.

Bezos et al. have indeed built a paradigm-shifting company, and this book opens a fascinating window into it.

Well-written, humorous, intelligent. In short an excellent read.

Except, might there have been more criticism directed towards the possible darker side of Amazon?

For instance the working conditions in the fulfillment centers, and the acquisition practices -- it's fair the author mentione ...more

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About Brad Stone

I am a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," which won the Business Book of the Year Award in 2013 from The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs.

Over the last few years, I have authored over a dozen cover stories for Businessweek on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Costco and the Chinese s ...more

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“When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. —Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010” — 13 likes

“It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” — 7 likes

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