Amazon at 30 What’s next for ‘The Everything Company’?

Three decades after the day it started, it’s hard to understand Amazon’s scale.
Consider its huge warehouse in Dartford, just outside London. It has millions of items in stock, and hundreds of thousands of them are purchased every day, and it takes two hours from the time something is ordered, the company says, to be picked, packed and shipped.
Now, imagine that scene and multiply it by 175. That’s the number of “fulfillment centers,” as Amazon likes to call them, it has around the world.

tu, tu, tu, tu, tu, tu,
Even if you think you can visualize that endless confusion of packages traveling around the world, you have to remember something else: that’s just a fraction of what Amazon does.
It is also a major media and streaming company (Amazon Prime Video); market leader in home camera systems (Ring) and smart speakers (Alexa) and tablets and e-readers (Kindle); hosts and supports vast expanses of the Internet (Amazon Web Services); and much more besides.
“It’s long been called ‘The Everything Store,’ but I think at this point Amazon is sort of the ‘Everything Company,'” Bloomberg’s Amanda Mull tells me.
“It’s so big and so pervasive and touches so many different parts of life, that after a while, people take Amazon’s existence for granted in all sorts of elements of daily life,” she says.
Or, as the company itself once joked, pretty much the only way to get through a day without somehow enriching Amazon was to “live in a cave.”