“for many years we were on a journey to figure out if we could get to same-day delivery.” The quest sparked a $60 million investment in Kozmo.com, which delivered everything, from snacks to video games, to a New York City customer’s doorstep. (It went bust in 2001.) Bezos even wondered aloud whether Amazon could hire college students on every block in Manhattan and get them to store popular products in their apartments and deliver them on bicycles. Employees were dumbstruck. “We were like, Aren’t we already worried about theft from our distribution center in Atlanta?” says Bruce Jones, an
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