Looking like a trillion dollars

The latest member of the trillion-dollar market-cap club has come a long way since Jeff Bezos, not wanting to miss out on the internet boom, quit his job on Wall Street and moved to Seattle to knock out a business plan. He came up with a list of 20 products that were suitable to be marketed online, settled on books, and kicked off a company in the garage of his rented home. By 1995 that company had sold its first book, the well-known page-turner, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.

Ever since, Amazon has been rampaging up and down the high street, devouring all it sees. It is the leviathan of the retail world, with the size of a diplodocus but the attitude and social grace of a velociraptor.

The company evokes strong emotions from those who interact with it — and wildly different ones, depending on whether you are a customer, a competitor, or a low-level employee. Competitors can’t stand it because it’s so good at what it does.

And Bezos just has to hint at going into a new sector, such as health care, for share prices of the incumbents to start tumbling.

Employees in Amazon’s warehouses have filed many a complaint about their working conditions, but last year’s patent for giant airships acting as airborne warehouses to restock delivery drones suggests that their positions might soon be automated anyway.

The key factor is how much its customers love the company, particularly the 100-million who are members of Amazon Prime and whose average annual spend is a multiple of the regular user. For them, Amazon is an essential part of everyday life.

Amazon is the leviathan of the retail world, with the size of a diplodocus but the attitude and social grace of a velociraptor