Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone

The movie performed reasonably well at the box office, but unfortunately for Amazon, the toys didn’t sell for whatever reason, and ended up sitting on the shelves of Amazon’s FCs, gathering dust. “It was just a thud of a license,” recalls Jason Wilkie, a former in-stock manager in the toys group. “You couldn’t even discount it. Nobody wanted it.” Analyzing the mistake, Amazon’s retail execs concluded that capricious human emotion had interfered with the cool-headed evaluation of the available data, which might have led to a more conservative purchase order. The project that emerged was called “Hands Off the Wheel.” Over the next few years, in-stock managers across the retail group were moved to different jobs or booted from the company and replaced by automated systems. Software, not people, would crunch the numbers and place purchase orders. Algorithms might not be able to perfectly gauge demand for cinematic toy licenses, but they could predict the surge of interest in, for example, canine anxiety jackets to soothe dogs before the July 4th fireworks display, or snow shovels before a predicted winter storm in the Midwest, and so on.