The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

Jeff Wilke’s job was to fix the mistakes of his predecessor. Jimmy Wright and his cowboy crew from Walmart had designed Amazon’s nationwide logistics network in the late nineties and were the best in the world at building large-scale retail distribution. But in moving quickly to satisfy Bezos’s open-ended goal to store and ship everything, they had created a system that was expensive, unreliable, and hungry for an emergency influx of employees from Seattle at the end of every year. “It was a mess,” says Bruce Jones. “It was pretty much how Walmart did all their distribution centers, which was great if you had to send out five thousand rolls of toilet paper. But it was not well suited to small orders.”