
Jeff Bezos in 1999 on Amazon's Plans Before the Dotcom Crash - meerita
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GltlJO56S1g
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meerita
I'm also surprised at how convinced he was about taking care of the customers.
The customer comes first: and it is the ultimate goal. It's what made Amazon
successful. I remember my first problem with Amazon, a book that came in a bit
broken (one angle was crushed), the customer support responded the same day of
presenting the complain and they've told me to take it to the nearest library,
which they had already sent the order to send me a new one. When I read that
email, they earned it a loyal customer for life.

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jjeaff
This is just some armchair quarterbacking, but I suspect that this kind of "no
questions asked" customer service is very good at retaining new customers but
may not be a profitable practice long term. It may be that Amazon is able to
keep this going due to subsidies from other, profitable portions of their
business.

I have seen lots of companies with permissive return policies that seem to
erode over time. REI comes to mind. Best Buy also used to be much easier to
return things. Costco might have a winning plan by requiring membership and
retaining a higher income customer.

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perl4ever
The way gas stations work, with profits on the attached convenience store or
fast food, seems to show no signs of changing. So I don't see that having
Amazon operate at break-even or a slight loss, subsidized by AWS, is
necessarily unsustainable.

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jjeaff
No, but it will go away once they drive out all competitors that don't have a
separate cash cow.

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throwGuardian
His foresight and confidence is commendable. So is his leadership - steering a
company of tens of thousands of people towards the vision/mission he sets is
incredibly hard to execute, and he's done it for decades now

