MR AMAZON’S CASH CAN’T STOP FLOWING
Bezonomics Brian Dumaine S&S £20 ★★★★★
When Brian Dumaine set out to write a book about how Amazon and its creator Jeff Bezos were conquering the world, even he could not have imagined its prescience.
The coronavirus pandemic has supercharged the internet giant: with highstreet shops shuttered, Amazon purchases have escalated. The company’s share price has rocketed accordingly, as has its need for thousands more workers.
Bezos (right), the son of Jacklyn Gise, a high-school student, and Ted Jorgensen, a unicyclist who soon vanished, was raised by his mother and her new partner, Mike Bezos, his adoptive father. A substantial influence on his upbringing, however, was also his grandfather, ‘Pop’ Gise, a rancher who had previously worked at a high level in US missile defence systems. Pop Gise observed that the impressive degree of data-focus in his beloved grandson sometimes came at the expense of empathy.
One day, after the young Jeff calculated how many years his grandma had taken off her life by chain-smoking, and let her know, Pop warned him: ‘You’re going to find out one day that it’s harder to be kind than clever.’ Bezos himself enjoys telling the story, but accounts of Amazon meetings in which he barks at hapless executives ‘I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?’ suggest his grandfather’s advice might still be relevant. At moments the writing flickers into fuzzy awe. We read, among other plaudits, that Bezos ‘embodies three characteristics that separate him from all other mere mortal entrepreneurs’ (resourcefulness, truth-seeking and vision). Yet while evidence of Bezos’s immortality is as yet unobtainable, it is true that exceptional qualities must indeed attach to a man who built a $1trillion empire.
Where the book really shines is in its detailed but clear exposition of how the Amazon phenomenon was built on expert data analysis, marketplace psychology and perpetual innovation – and where it is headed. Bezos was obsessed with creating ease for the consumer: the ‘one-click’ buying technology, for example, ‘dramatically increased’ the likelihood of customers completing purchases. A subscription to the Amazon Prime delivery service, too, artfully locks consumers into the wider ‘Amazon ecosystem’: in the US, more people now have Prime membership than regularly attend church. Beyond consumer fulfilment, what the model means for workers’ rights, high-street stores, government tax revenues and smaller companies is a complex and often more chilling picture.
Politicians and regulators have their eyes on Amazon and its profits, but will a company named after the Earth’s biggest river ever know its own limits? Bezos’s desire to expand into sectors such as healthcare, banking and even space suggests the opposite.