I'm Right Again Dot Com

           An Online Publication of the Anonymous Anything Society — November 7, 2018

EVERYTHING YOU OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT AMAZON.COM AND JEFF BEZOS

    Since the national and local media will be full of election night returns, we're going to turn our sights this Wednesday on the retail marketing phenomenon "Amazon.com" and its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos.

    Jeffery Preston Bezos was born in Albuquerque, on January 12, 1964 where he, unlike most of us, learned how to spell the name of his birthplace before he was raised in Houston, Texas by his parents, Miguel and Jacklyn Bezos.  He graduated from Princeton University and worked for D.L. Shaw, an investment management firm.

    He left Shaw in 1994. and with $300,000 borrowed from his parents and a business plan he formulated while driving to Seattle, began an internet company that sold only books shipped from his garage in its inception.

    This is where Bezos did his most important selling—to investors, whom he persuaded to continue to support his dream after a series of money-losing quarters that would have discouraged most investors.  Bezos has repaid their faith and the faith of his wife MacKenzie in his dream many times over.  Amazon.com is the world's largest internet retailer.  It markets most anything one could think of, out of a growing number of regional shipping centers, one of which is under development in Tucson, Arizona. 

    Amazon.com has formulated and bought an amazing array of printing and marketing endeavors, including Kindle digital books and an array of electronic readers.

    (Full disclosure: Amazon's subsidiaries print and sell three books I have written, offering them at a 30% Amazon/70% Author division of revenues in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and now Japan).  No marketing company comes close to matching what Amazon.com offers book authors.

     Amazon.com is now capitalized at somewhere north of $232 billion and employs 613,000 people, not counting those employed by growing number of subsidiaries.  These include a rapidly expanding air freight delivery service and The Washington Post newspaper, a 140-year-old institution that broke the story of the infamous Nixon-era "Watergate" break-in of Democrat party headquarters in Washington by Republican operatives in 1972.

    Bezos has rejuvenated the national publication since purchasing it for $200-million in 2013.  The Post employs a data-driven approach that constantly measures readers' preferences and responds to them with headlines and news accounts.  In response, readership and revenues have exploded. I read its digital edition daily.

    Amazon.com owns two sports franchises: The Washington Wizards (basketball) and the Washington Capitals (Hockey).  It is going to be interesting to follow how Bezos fares in those endeavors—and what may be next in the burgeoning Amazon.com empire.

(Why name it Amazon.com?  "A" is the first letter in the alphabet and with the exception of the atmosphere, the Amazon river is the largest one thing on our planet in terms of volume).

    -Phil Richardson, Observer of the Human Condition and Storyteller

    "He goes doddering on into his old age, making a public nuisance of himself."—Joseph Menchen

Our unending thanks to Jim Bromley, who programs our Archive of Prior Commentaries

Respond to: k7os@comcast.net