Amazon.com

In early 1994, Jeff Bezos read that web usage was growing at a rate of 2300% a year and decided to establish an online bookstore. He left his job as a vice president at D. E. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and founded Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington on July 5, 1994. He chose the location for its abundance of technical talent, as Microsoft was in the area.

 
The name Amazon.com was chosen because the Amazon River is one of the largest rivers in the world and so the name suggests large size, and also in part because it starts with "A" and therefore would show up near the beginning of alphabetical lists.

Bezos almost called the internet giant ‘Relentless.com’. If you type that address into an internet browser, it still leads you to the Amazon website.

The father of Jeff Bezos was a unicyclist in a circus.

The first book sold on Amazon.com was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. Australian software engineer John Wainwright, who was based in California, was a friend of Amazon's first employee Shal Kaphan. On April 3, 1995, he got the opportunity to place the first non-company order from Amazon.com for the book, which explores the mechanisms of intelligence through computer modeling. Bezos later named a building after Wainwright to honor the occasion.

The Amazon.com online shop was launched on July 16, 1995 by Jeff Bezos, originally selling only books, but has since extended to selling CDs, video games, DVDs, toys and games, computer software, electronic items, clothes, furniture and food.

One of Amazon's earliest employees brought his corgi, Rufus, to work each day. He became such a fixture that the company named a building after him and allows employees to bring their dogs to work. Amazon has over 2,000 four legged "employees", averaging nearly 600 per day.

By 2000 Amazon claimed 17 million customers in over 160 countries, and was one of the world's most visited Web sites, but had not yet made a profit. The company recorded its first net profit of $5 million in the fourth quarter of 2001 and reported profits of $359 million in 2005.

In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization. and by 2021 it had become the world's largest retailer outside of China, 

Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest person — for four hours — thanks to a surge in stock on July 27, 2017 which increased his worth by $1.1 billion to $90.9 billion (£69.2bn). It meant he overtook Microsoft’s Bill Gates. By noon the next day, Bezos’s stock had fallen.

The Amazon founder was back on top on October 27, 2017, after another leap in the value of his shares took his fortune to $91.8 billion (£69.9 bn). He would continue to sporadically surpass Gates and on March 6, 2018, Bezos was designated the wealthiest person in the world with a registered net worth of $112 billion.

Jeff Bezos 2018. By Seattle City Council from Seattle 

Amazon opened its first supermarket in Seattle on January 22, 2018. Amazon Go  is without checkouts - human or self-service. It uses an array of ceiling-mounted cameras to identify each customer and track what items they select, eliminating the need for billing. Purchases are billed to customers' credit cards when they leave the store.

Amazon makes television and film content through Amazon Studios and produces consumer electronics - most notably, Kindle e-readers, Echo devices, Fire tablets, and Fire TVs.

Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa, was first introduced in 2014. The service was initially available on Amazon's Echo device, which was a cylindrical speaker with a built-in voice-controlled virtual assistant.

Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa, was given her name for two reasons. The hard consonant "X" allows her to recognize her name easier, and the name "Alexa" is also reminiscent of the ancient Library Alexandria as the library was the "keeper of all knowledge."

Almost $1 out of every $2 spent online in the US is with Amazon.

There is a giant cave bear skeleton in the lobby of Amazon's corporate office in Seattle. Naturally, the CEO, Jeff Bezos, used Amazon to purchase it.

The Amazon "pickers" that find your order in the warehouse walk about 13 miles in one 10-hour shift.

At Amazon all employees, including Jeff Bezos, spend two days every two years working at the company's customer service desk to help understand the customer service process.

The Amazon logo is not a smile. It is supposed to signify that they have everything from A to Z.

Sources Wikipedia, Hutchinson Encyclopedia © RM 2011. Helicon Publishing is division of RM. BBC