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Toys R Bust - Another Victim of Amazon? | tutor2u Business

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We've just flicked the switch on moving all our digital resources to instant digital download - via our new subject stores. For every subject you can now access each digital resource as soon as it is ordered. This will always be the latest edition of each resource too (and we'll update you automatically if there is an upgraded version to use).

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FLORENCE, N.J. - Nissa Scott started working at the cavernous Amazon warehouse in southern New Jersey late last year, stacking plastic bins the size of small ottomans. It was not, she says, the most stimulating activity. And lifting the bins, which often weigh 25 pounds each, was also tiring over 10-hour shifts.

Now Ms. Scott, 21, watches her replacement - a giant, bright yellow mechanical arm - do the stacking.

Her new job at Amazon is to babysit several robots at a time, troubleshooting them when necessary and making sure they have bins to load. On a recent afternoon, a claw at end of the arm grabbed a bin off a conveyor belt and stacked it on another bin, forming neat columns on wooden pallets surrounding the robot. It was the first time Amazon had shown the arm, the latest generation of robots in use at its warehouses, to a reporter.

"For me, it's the most mentally challenging thing we have here," Ms. Scott said of her new job. "It's not repetitive."

Perhaps no company embodies the anxieties and hopes around automation better than Amazon. Many people, including President Trump, blame the company for destroying traditional retail jobs by enticing people to shop online. At the same time, the company's eye-popping growth has turned it into a hiring machine, with an unquenchable need for entry-level warehouse workers to satisfy customer orders.

Amazon's global work force is three times larger than Microsoft's and 18 times larger than Facebook's, and last week, Amazon said it would open a second headquarters in North America with up to 50,000 new jobs.

Complicating the equation even more, Amazon is also on the forefront of automation, finding new ways of getting robots to do the work once handled by employees. In 2014, the company began rolling out robots to its warehouses using machines originally developed by Kiva Systems, a company Amazon bought for $775 million two years earlier and renamed Amazon Robotics. Amazon now has more than 100,000 robots in action around the world, and it has plans to add many more to the mix.

The robots make warehouse work less tedious and physically taxing, while also enabling the kinds of efficiency gains that let a customer order dental floss after breakfast and receive it before dinner.

"It's certainly true that Amazon would not be able to operate at the costs they have and the costs they provide customers without this automation," said Martin Ford, a futurist and author of "Rise of the Robots," a book about automation. "Maybe we wouldn't be getting two-day shipping."

The dynamics between people and machines play out on a daily basis on the floor of Amazon warehouses in places like Florence, N.J., and Kent, Wash. In Kent, the robots vaguely resemble giant beetles and scurry around with vertical shelves loaded with merchandise weighing up to 3,000 pounds on their backs. Hundreds of them move autonomously inside a large caged area, tailgating each other but not colliding.

On one edge of the cage, a group of human workers - the "stowers" - stuff products onto the shelves, replenishing their inventory. The robots whisk those shelves away and when a customer order arrives for products stored on their backs, they queue up at stations on another edge of the cage like cars waiting to go through a toll both.

There, human "pickers" follow instructions on computer screens, grabbing items off the shelves and putting them in plastic bins, which then disappear on conveyor belts destined for "packers," people who put the products in cardboard boxes bound for customers.

Dave Clark, the top executive in charge of operations at Amazon, said the company wanted the machines to perform the most monotonous tasks, leaving people to do jobs that engage them mentally.

"It's a new item each time," Mr. Clark said. "You're finding something, you're inspecting things, you're engaging your mind in a way that I think is important."

The robots also cut down on the walking required of workers, making Amazon pickers more efficient and less tired. The robots also allow Amazon to pack shelves together like cars in rush-hour traffic, because they no longer need aisle space for humans. The greater density of shelf space means more inventory under one roof, which means better selection for customers.

The Amazon warehouse in Florence shows the latest example of the kinds of jobs machines can do better than people. Eight mechanical arms are in operation at the facility, a warehouse where large quantities of merchandise are broken down into smaller units and distributed to Amazon fulfillment centers across the country.

The arms go by the awkward name of robotic palletizers, but workers have given them a dash of personality, sticking signs on each one naming them after Stuart, Dave and other minion characters from the "Despicable Me" movies. Unlike the warehouse robots in Kent, which were based on the machines Amazon got through its Kiva acquisition, these arms come from an outside company.

Amazon began installing them late last year, not long after it opened the warehouse in Florence. The robot arm is configured to pick up only bins of a standard size, not objects of other dimensions. In a demonstration of future possibilities, Amazon showed a virtual reality simulation used to prototype new robot concepts, including an arm with a forklift attachment that moved pallets.

When Amazon installed the robots, some people who had stacked bins before, like Ms. Scott, took courses at the company to become robot operators. Many others moved to receiving stations, where they manually sort big boxes of merchandise into bins. No people were laid off when the robots were installed, and Amazon found new roles for the displaced workers, Mr. Clark said.

"The people didn't go anywhere," he said.

The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?

For now, there are warehouse tasks - for example, picking individual items off shelves, with all their various shapes and sizes - where people outperform robots. Amazon has added 80,000 warehouse employees in the United States since adding the Kiva robots, for a total of more than 125,000 warehouse employees. And it says the warehouse hiring spree will continue.

But start-ups and researchers are scrambling to overcome the many remaining technical obstacles. Amazon even sponsors an annual contest to encourage more innovation in the category.

Mr. Ford, the author, believes it is just a matter of time before the employment picture in Amazon's warehouses changes.

"My assumption is this technology will eventually displace a lot of people in those warehouses," Mr. Ford said. "I would not say that overnight huge numbers of jobs disappear. Maybe the first indication is they don't get rid of those people but the pace of job creation slows down."

Amazon's Mr. Clark said history showed that automation increases productivity and, in some cases, demand from consumers, which ultimately creates more jobs. He said warehouse workers would continue to work in technologically rich environments.

"It's a myth that automation destroys net job growth," he said.

In the case of the Florence facility, it opened up the new opportunity for Ms. Scott.

At one point, one of the arms knocked over a tote, sending a dozen or so cone-shaped plastic coffee filters skidding across the ground. Ms. Scott hit a button that froze the arm so she could safely pick up the mess.

Then the arms started working again.

"The robot will work the same all day long," said Edward Cohoon, who supervises Ms. Scott and other Amazon workers as they tend to individual robots. "Their stomachs don't grumble."

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As Amazon Pushes Forward With Robots, Workers Find New Roles

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FLORENCE, N.J. - Nissa Scott started working at the cavernous Amazon warehouse in southern New Jersey late last year, stacking plastic bins the size of small ottomans. It was not, she says, the most stimulating activity. And lifting the bins, which often weigh 25 pounds each, was also tiring over 10-hour shifts.

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When news broke out regarding Amazon's harsh work conditions, numerous current and former employees were not surprised by the picture that was painted of the e-commerce giant. The testimonials paint a portrait of a culture in which people are subjected to suboptimal work conditions that leave many feeling exhausted and overly stressed. One employee described it as "purposeful Darwinism."

Publications around the world were quick to criticize Amazon for mistreating its employees and people threatened to boycott the company until it changed its practices. Both of these reactions are especially ironic considering the Amazon we see today--with all of its flaws--is one that we, the consumers, created. Almost every one of the people criticizing the company would be furious if they had to pay full retail price for their Amazon purchases. As the e-commerce industry is becoming commoditized, competing on price suddenly becomes a priority for retailers and a deciding point for consumers.

We are currently living in what Seth Godin calls a "race to the bottom:" a phase where companies are seeking to squeeze every penny out of every market. They do this because their competitors want to drive their costs to zero so that they will be the obvious commodity choice. As consumers, we fuel this ungodly race by wanting all of it-- fast and cheap and now.

Craig Smith, Insead Chair in Ethics and Social Responsibility, makes the point that customers are not an homogeneous group; they fall into three distinct segments. The first (and smallest) group "cares very strongly about sustainability issues" and often presses companies to treat their partners fairly and ethically. When companies fail to do so, this group is quick to boycott them and move their dollars elsewhere.

The second group is much larger, and doesn't have a "real understanding of sustainability." While they are not engaged directly with ethics or honesty practices, they put their trust in companies and are only swayed when companies betray their trust. The third group, which is probably the biggest of all, simply does not care. They want their products fast and cheap with little regard to how it is made. While there is a shift in behavior towards companies with sustainable and ethical practices, the choice is not yet reflected in how people spend their dollars.

While Amazon could do more to treat its employees better and create a positive working culture, this episode is merely a symptom of a much larger problem. If you have a problem with the working conditions at Amazon (and other giant companies), remember that every dollar you spend there is a vote for the company to continue on the same path. Insisting on paying as close to COGS as humanly possible is not only dangerous, it hastens the "race to the bottom" and disregards ethics and sustainable practices.

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When news broke out regarding Amazon's harsh work conditions, numerous current and former employees were not surprised by the picture that was painted of the e-commerce giant. The testimonials paint a portrait of a culture in which people are subjected to suboptimal work conditions that leave many feeling exhausted and overly stressed.

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When news broke out regarding Amazon’s harsh work conditions, numerous current and former employees were not surprised by the picture that was painted of the e-commerce giant. The testimonials paint a portrait of a culture in which people are subjected to suboptimal work conditions that leave many feeling exhausted and overly stressed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gregoris-kalai/amazon-is-cruel-and-it-is_b_8026824.html

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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/soej.12205/full

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Amazon adds second headquarter with up to 50,000 jobs

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Amazon adds second headquarter with up to 50,000 jobs

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/09/07/amazon-plans-second-headquarters-dubbed-hq-2/640861001/

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http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-govconduct

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As Amazon Pushes Forward With Robots, Workers Find New Roles

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/technology/amazon-robots-workers.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FAmazon.com%20Inc.&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

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Picture your ideal neighborhood. What does it look like? Is it manicured, with buildings set in a pattern so that everything flows together, designed for perfection? Or is it gritty and spontaneous, the kind of place where a restaurant might move into the space that used to house a dry cleaner? Boxes bearing the Amazon logo can arrive at doorsteps in either of these environments, of course, but Amazon's founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, prefers the second type.

"I think neighborhoods, cities, and towns that have evolved are more interesting and delightful than ones that have been carefully top-down planned," he tells me when I meet him at Amazon's Seattle headquarters in November. "There's just something very human" about them, he says.

"Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service," CEO Bezos says. "And I love that. it's super-motivating for us."

It's a surprising answer from a man known for his disciplined adherence to Six Sigma-style processes and data-driven decision making. But it's also revealing. Over its nearly 22 years, Amazon has moved into one sector after another and gentrified it, even if that meant tearing down its own existing structures. Amazon's Echo smart speaker rose on the lot where its Fire Phone flamed out. The latest version of Amazon's streaming music service, Amazon Music Unlimited, was constructed on top of its initial music store, Amazon MP3, which opened nine years ago. Amazon Studios' Emmy Award-winning original TV shows are built upon a crowdsourcing platform that the company first introduced in 2010 for aspiring scriptwriters. Even the company's fashion business-Amazon is now the second-largest seller of apparel in the U.S., according to Morgan Stanley-evolved from brand experiments in outdoor furniture (2004), home goods (2008), electronic accessories (2009), diapers (2014), and now perishables such as organic, fair-trade-certified coffee.

Unlike Apple, Google, and Microsoft, Amazon is not fixated on a tightly designed ecosystem of interlocking apps and services. Bezos instead emphasizes platforms that each serves its own customers in the best and fastest possible way. "Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service," he says. "And I love that. It's super-motivating for us." That impulse has spawned an awesome stream of creative firsts. Just this past year, Prime Video became available in more than 200 countries and territories, following the November debut of The Grand Tour, Amazon's most-watched premiere ever. Twitch, the streaming video-game network that Amazon acquired in 2014, unveiled its first three original titles from its recently formed studios. Amazon invested millions in startups that will build voice-control apps for the intelligent assistant Alexa and give her thousands of new skills. The company opened two dozen new fulfillment centers, became the largest online store in India, and made its first delivery by autonomous drone in the United Kingdom.

Bezos's strategy of continuous evolution has allowed the company to experiment in adjacent areas-and then build them into franchises. The website that once sold only books now lets anyone set up a storefront and sell just about anything. The warehouse and logistics capabilities that Amazon built to sort, pack, and ship those books are available, for a price, to any seller. Amazon Web Services, which grew out of the company's own e-commerce infrastructure needs, has become a $13 billion business that not only powers the likes of Airbnb and Netflix, but stores your Kindle e-book library and makes it possible for Alexa to tell you whether or not you'll need an umbrella today.

Video: How Ford Is Integrating Amazon's Alexa Into All Of Its Cars

Amazon is a singular enterprise, one that rises to the top of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies list because it has continued to be nimble even as it has achieved enviable scale. To truly understand how Bezos is meshing size and agility in 2017, though, you need to look beyond sales figures ($100 billion in 2015) and the stock price (up more than 300% in the past five years) and consider three initiatives that drive Amazon today: Prime, the company's rapidly proliferating $99-per-year membership program; an incursion into the physical world with brick-and-mortar stores, something the company has long resisted; and a restless rethinking of logistics, epitomized by a new fulfillment center an hour outside Seattle that features high-tech robots working alongside human workers like a factory of the future.

Our mobile-first, on-demand world finds its roots in Amazon's founding idea: that digital commerce will radically reshape our marketplace. The company's impact has already been staggering. In January, the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance conducted a survey of nearly 3,000 independent businesses, half of them retailers, asking them to cite the biggest threats they faced. Competition from chains and big-box stores, health care, finding employees, and rising rents all ranked near the bottom as modest concerns. "Way above everything was competition from Amazon," says ILSR codirector Stacy Mitchell. (The study also found that Amazon's expansion in 2015 led to a net loss across all businesses of 149,000 jobs.)

Despite all the twists and surprises in recent decades-all the newcomers with youth, funding, and can-do enthusiasm-Amazon remains the undisputed leader, a startup at heart still striving to remake our expectations. And to repeatedly remake itself.

Nearly all of Amazon's most recent innovations share a connection to Prime, which by some estimates accounts for 60% of the total dollar value of all merchandise sold on the site. Between 40 million and 50 million people in the United States use Prime, and, according to Morgan Stanley, those customers spend around $2,500 on Amazon annually, more than four times what nonmembers spend. (Amazon refuses to offer any hard numbers related to Prime membership-that would be competitor focused rather than customer obsessed, as the executives there say-but it will confirm that Prime members spend more and shop across a greater number of categories than other users.)

"The way this company [is], it wouldn't surprise me if we continue to keep accelerating," says Greg Greeley, Amazon's head of Prime.

If you somehow manage to take advantage of every Prime membership feature, it's undeniably a good bargain. Along with free two-day shipping for millions of products, and tens of thousands of items available at your door in an hour or less through Prime Now, there is one-hour restaurant delivery, a free e-book a month (including the entire Harry Potter series), and ad-free viewing of a streaming video-game channel on Twitch-all included in the annual fee. You can get early access to Amazon's best deals, 20% off diapers, and unlimited photo storage. For a few more dollars, Prime can be upgraded to include unlimited audiobooks, grocery delivery, and a subscription to HBO that can be watched on Amazon's Fire TV streaming media player. More than 50 "benefits" were added for members around the globe in the second half of 2016 alone, says Greg Greeley, Amazon's global VP in charge of Prime. "I would like to say that the team thinks, 'Oh, boy, we'll take a deep breath here,' " he says. "But the way this company [is], it wouldn't surprise me if we continue to keep accelerating."

What Amazon Prime is selling most of all is time. Every executive I spoke to, when asked about how it all fits together, cites this desire to get you whatever you want in the shortest window possible. Stephenie Landry, the Amazon vice president who launched Prime Now in 2014 and has overseen its expansion into 49 cities in seven countries, explains that her business merely has to answer two questions: "Do you have what I want, and can you get it to me when I need it?" The rest of the customer experience is built around answering both questions in the affirmative.

The more products and services Amazon is able to cram into Prime, the more likely users are to renew their membership and buy more stuff, which gives Amazon more data about their tastes and what they are likely to buy next. That information is used to spin out new products and services, such as the Dash button, which replenishes popular items with a tap, and Alexa, which is built, in part, for shopping. "You can just say, 'Alexa, reorder toothpaste,' " says Bezos. "And it knows which kind of toothpaste." That's why he has repeatedly called Prime the company's "flywheel": a device used in engines that provides constant energy. It is both an accelerant to Amazon's forward motion and a beneficiary.

A sizzle video for Amazon Go, an automated convenience store being tested in Seattle.

Bezos says that people have been asking him for 20 years whether he would ever open physical stores. The answer, consistently, has been no. "I've answered pretty much the same way the whole time, which is that we will if we have a differentiated idea," Bezos tells me. Yet today, suddenly, Amazon has four concepts in the works.

Why the shift? In part it links back to Prime; retail stores offer a tangible lure for the uninitiated. But, as Bezos explains, Amazon's technological sophistication also now makes it possible for in-store shoppers to interact with its digital platforms in all-new manners. Monitoring the interplay is a classic Amazon way to spot new opportunities.

The first wave of Amazon stores is somewhat traditional: More than 30 pop-up shops showcasing Amazon's electronic gadgets-Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, Fire tablets, and Dash buttons-dotted the country by late last year. The next phase: expanding the highly curated Amazon Books stores -which showcase titles with a higher-than-four-stars customer rating alongside excerpts of reviews from the website-from three locations to eight. But it is the third leg of the company's retail experiment that begins to rattle expectations. Amazon Go is a convenience-store concept the company announced in December (it will launch publicly in Seattle in early 2017). After a shopper swipes a code on her mobile phone at the entryway turnstile, she can grab whatever items she likes; they are magically added to her digital cart and automatically paid for when she leaves, through her existing account. This ability to skip both the line and any cash register on the way out is made possible by Amazon's cloud computing, machine learning, voice control, and logistics know-how. It's also another example of Amazon creating a technology platform that could be sold to other businesses.

Finally, and more quietly, another grocery-store concept is also being prepped. Although no one inside Amazon is willing to talk about it, documents filed with local buildings departments in Seattle and the San Francisco suburbs of Sunnyvale and San Carlos show that the company is erecting stores in all three locales. (Construction at the Seattle location-where a Chinese restaurant once stood, on a busy commercial thoroughfare in the fast-growing Ballard neighborhood-appears to be nearly complete.) The documents describe a system that would seem to extend the AmazonFresh grocery service: Customers load their digital carts remotely and pay online, then schedule a physical pickup within a two-hour window. "When picking up purchased items, customers either can drive into a designated parking area with eight parking stalls where the purchased items will be delivered to their cars, or they can walk into the retail area to pick up their items," the filings say.

These stores are not likely to change the way most Americans get their cornflakes overnight. Still, Amazon has always been good at being patient-and incrementally improving its offerings. Since AmazonFresh launched in 2007, the service has slowly expanded to dozens of cities. The Amazon neighborhood continues to change.

Planted on the edge of a military base, Amazon's recently opened fulfillment center, in DuPont, Washington, looks from the outside like a generic warehouse, with a line of idling trucks snaking around the building waiting to load and unload product. But what's inside represents a huge advance in the way Amazon sorts, packs, and ships orders.

It starts with a "vision tunnel," a conveyor belt tented by a dome full of cameras and scanners. As each box comes off the truck, it is photographed and scanned on all sides. Image-recognition algorithms then sort each parcel based on variables such as the type of product or size and weight. What takes humans with bar-code scanners an hour to accomplish at older fulfillment centers can now be done in half that time.

Boxes are towed from the docks into the million-square-foot warehouse, sometimes by driverless vehicles. This facility handles the largest items that Amazon ships, which is why there's also a huge, 6-ton yellow robot on the main floor. It has a six-axis arm that could pick up a car with ease, but today it's mostly lifting pallets loaded 4 feet high with diapers and Keurig cups to the second floor of the warehouse where they will await shipping. The arm performs a constant, mostly silent waltz with an ensemble of rolling Amazon robots, which represent the next-generation offspring of the company's $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012, and were only fully integrated into the fulfillment center workflow last year.

Amazon One, a Boeing 767, is part of a fleet of 40 cargo planes Amazon plans to roll out over the next two years.[Photo: courtesy of Amazon]

Once a package leaves the warehouse, it may end up on a Boeing 767 with the Prime Air logo emblazoned on its side. Bezos rolled out the first in a fleet of 40 wide-bodies last summer, which will be operated in partnership with two aircraft-leasing companies. In January, Amazon announced that the fleet would be supported by a new air hub in Kentucky that will employ 2,000 workers-a $1.49 billion investment, according to a spokeswoman with the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. The planes, like the thousands of cargo trailers that already sport the Prime logo, make Amazon less dependent on its partnerships with FedEx, DHL, and the United States Postal Service. And, pending FAA approval, those fully operational Amazon delivery drones might one day cut delivery time down to 30 minutes or less.

Amazon stresses that its new automated fulfillment centers actually require more human workers than the old ones did, because the warehouse can store a significantly larger number of products-which all still need people for boxing and general oversight (plus, someone's got to service those robots when they need repairs). The plant in DuPont, active almost 24/7, employs more than a thousand people full time. At stow station 1405, for instance, I watch a young guy with tattoos, a man bun, and large-gauge flesh-tunnel earrings grab item after item from orange robots, scan each one, and, after the computer gives the green light, send it to be boxed. Over the holiday season, Amazon hired an extra 120,000 workers at centers nationwide to help meet demand. This is what the future of American factory work might look like.

"I have the best job in the world because I get to work in the future," says Bezos.[Photo: Peter Hapak]

Amazon's business is not without its challenges. The company's imperative to deliver more stuff faster has racheted up its annual shipping costs north of $11 billion, reinforcing the pressure to wring efficiencies out of the company's processes and its people. In the run-up to last year's holiday shopping season, pilots who work for Amazon's Prime Air shipping contractors went on strike, demanding hiring increases to reduce their workload. It's no wonder that the blistering 2015 New York Times article about bruising work environments at Amazon remains in the popular consciousness.

Amazon is working to counteract this legacy. The company pledged in January to create more than 100,000 full-time positions over the next 18 months, and it's building a new headquarters complex in the heart of downtown Seattle. Five buildings and a 2,000-seat auditorium will surround a trio of glass-enclosed spheres that, when completed in 2018, will contain more than 3,000 species of plants and trees from around the world. There will be flexible, couch-filled work spaces and an "Expressions Lab," where employees can learn to knit or attend a "Bob Ross Paint Night." One floor will include a small outdoor dog park, and there will be several markets and cafeterias. Amazon is also funding an additional streetcar for the city, as well as bicycle paths leading to the three-block complex, which includes 1.7 acres of public space. "The biggest thing is probably just that we're not in a suburban campus," says Bezos, "which I think would change the vibrancy and energy of Amazon."

In November, Amazon released a video ad portraying a pair of aging friends-a priest and an imam-laughing, hugging, and then ordering the same knee braces for each other. It is a sensitive and moving vignette, portraying Amazon as a connector of cultures, the kind of compassionate business it has not always been given credit for being. The ad arrived just two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, so I ask Bezos what the company's role might be in bridging the divides that exist in the U.S. After all, he bankrolls the Washington Post, which went after Trump aggressively during the presidential campaign (and was an early and influential opponent of Trump's immigration ban). His answer is almost laughably narrow. "Well, I'll tell you one way that I don't think anybody is divided," Bezos replies. "Everybody wants fast delivery. Low prices. I'm serious about this. Our job is to provide a great customer experience, and that is something that is universally desired all over the world."

It's tough to argue with his words. And yet this Bezosian boilerplate is certainly less than the full story. Because Amazon is doing more than delivering our next tube of toothpaste. By using the "divine discontent of the customer as a North Star," as Bezos puts it, the company is energizing a culture of relentless progress. The neighborhood may be changing, but maybe that's good. Maybe that's what business in the modern era is all about.

This article is part of our coverage of the World's Most Innovative Companies of 2017.

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Why Amazon Is The World's Most Innovative Company Of 2017

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Picture your ideal neighborhood. What does it look like? Is it manicured, with buildings set in a pattern so that everything flows together, designed for perfection? Or is it gritty and spontaneous, the kind of place where a restaurant might move into the space that used to house a dry cleaner?

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Amazon cutting costs so that the product is cheaper than in normal retail stores
http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-amazon-is-the-king-of-innovation-the-store-stars/

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How Amazon Just Changed The $800 Billion Supermarket World

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How Amazon Just Changed The $800 Billion Supermarket World

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2017/06/16/how-amazon-just-changed-the-800-billion-supermarket-world/#6c071d686697

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Bezos’s strategy of continuous evolution has allowed the company to experiment in adjacent areas—and then build them into franchises. The website that once sold only books now lets anyone set up a storefront and sell just about anything.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3067455/why-amazon-is-the-worlds-most-innovative-company-of-2017

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-27/amazon-s-spending-has-little-effect-on-revenue-profit-growth
shows how amazon has changed overtime and shows how their sales have become worldwide

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Shows how powerful Amazon is and gives statistics on the scale of customers in the US

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Amazon has a growing role in the U.S. economy that extends far beyond its retail business, according to a new report.

"Behind the packages on the doorstep, and behind the inviting interface and seamless service that has consistently put the company at the top of corporate reputation rankings, Amazon has quietly positioned itself at the center of a growing share of our daily activities and transactions , extending its tentacles across our economy, and with it, our lives," says the report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

According to ISLR:

Today, half of all U.S. households are subscribed to the membership program Amazon Prime, half of all online shopping searches start directly on Amazon, and Amazon captures nearly one in every two dollars that Americans spend online. Amazon sells more books, toys, and by next year, apparel and consumer electronics than any retailer online or off, and is investing heavily in its grocery business.

As a retailer, its market power now rivals or exceeds that of Walmart, and it stands only to grow: Within five years, one-fifth of the U.S.'s $3.6 trillion retail market will have shifted online, and Amazon is on track to capture two-thirds of that share.

And the numbers grow with every new product and sales event.

Black Friday weekend was Amazon's best-ever, according to the company.

Amazon device sales were up more than two times over last year and sales of Echo products increased sevenfold on Cyber Monday over last year.

In all, millions of Amazon-branded devices were sold this weekend, although the company doesn't release specific numbers and did not respond to a request for comment.

Some 5.1 million Amazon Echo devices have been sold since its introduction in late 2014, according to analysis by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP). The group surveyed Amazon customer and released its report just one week before Black Friday, when millions more devices were sold-through to consumers.

Echo is the flagship product - a Bluetooth speaker with a voice-controlled artificial intelligence named Alexa. Amazon Prime members can ask Alexa to control many smart home devices, retrieve information and play music. Of course, Alexa will also order from Amazon, although this is the least used feature.

"Our research shows that more than half of Echo owners use the device as more than a voice-controlled music speaker," said Josh Lowitz, CIRP partner and co-founder, in a written report. "Users report asking about weather and news, and increasingly controlling other connected devices."

In other words, they aren't ordering products. CIRP estimates that most are largely using Echo's voice-controlled features to play music, retrieve information ("Alexa, What's the weather today?) or to control smart home devices such as lights.

But Amazon is doing everything it can to change this. Echo and the Amazon family of products, including Kindle readers, are designed to get Echo owners to buy more goods .

Amazon's strategy has been to grow its Prime membership through exclusive offers and better pricing. The more consumers are drawn into the Amazon ecosystem, the more likely they are to exclusively use the company for pretty much everything they can.

Shoppers are already more likely to search Amazon for product information and reviews than even Google. Once they become accustomed to going first to Amazon, they cease to even compare prices, sometimes paying more for a product thanks to the convenience and perceived value of Prime.

It's a genius move by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, but chilling when you stop to think about just how much control that gives the company.

Walmart, though, is positioning itself for an epic battle with Amazon and its recent $3 billion purchase of Jet.com will help it better compete with Amazon's marketplace and technology platforms while leveraging the a vast distribution network that includes more than 6,000 stores.

ILSR contends that Amazon's growing dominance poses a threat to the economy through increased monopolization in industry and declining property tax revenue. There's also the rise of low-paid jobs in Amazon warehouses and fewer small businesses that make for vibrant communities.

The ILSR report is more than 70 pages long and looks at Amazon increasing dominance as a cloud services provider and provider of various fulfillment solutions.

All of which serves to strengthen Amazon's role in the economy.

Of course Amazon also creates opportunities, including the creation of the marketplace platform that gives brands and other merchants the ability to sell online and leverage Amazon's fulfillment properties.

It's not black and white, but Amazon's strength across several aspects of the economy is on the rise.

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Amazon's Growing Power In The U.S. Economy

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Amazon has a growing role in the U.S. economy that extends far beyond its retail business, according to a new report.

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Amazon celebrates 20 years: How the online giant has changed the retail world 

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Amazon celebrates 20 years: How the online giant has changed the retail world 

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https://www.thestar.com/business/2015/07/15/amazon-celebrates-20-years-how-the-online-giant-has-changed-the-retail-world.html

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterloeb/2017/03/28/amazon-will-grow-fast-through-innovation-and-bold-planning/#211492051dfa
The main objectives of the business.

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https://managementstudyguide.com/analysis-of-amazon-corporate-strategy.htm
Driven by its sources of competitive advantage wherein it is focus on technology, actualizing the benefits of economies of scale

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http://www.businessinsider.com/what-amazon-looked-like-when-it-launched-2015-3?op=1/#d-auctions-an-ebay-competitor-which-flopped-6

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Amazon expanding/ New headquarters/ Strategy

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Amazon expanding/ New headquarters/ Strategy

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http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/09/09/why-amazons-growth-ambitions-dont-fit-in-seattle.html

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https://www.retail-week.com/more/events-and-awards/tech/analysis-amazons-five-greatest-innovations/7020677.article

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http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/11/technology/amazon-cities/index.html
Amazon said it's second headquarters should have easy access to an airport with direct flights to Seattle, New York, San Francisco and Washington D.C. Atlanta has the advantage of being a major air travel hub that's within a two-hour flight from 80% of the U.S. population, according to the city government.

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Amazon Web Services, continually expanding and impressed many investors and gaining a lot of profit

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Amazon Web Services, continually expanding and impressed many investors and gaining a lot of profit

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http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-international-growth-2015-2

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https://www.thenation.com/article/amazon-effect/

News story:

Jeff Bezos wanted to get big fast and therefore used the advantages of the internet in the year 1995 with 16 million people using the internet. Internet users grow from 16 mil to 36 mil in just a year. A 2300% growth year on year.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2014/05/07/amazons-big-problem/#47bdbb212963

A problem Amazon is facing with growth

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Amazon has a big problem--Wal-Mart.

For years, Amazon has been expanding the scale and scope of its operation, both horizontally and vertically-a strategy that resembles that of Standard Oil's in the late 19 th century.

The problem is that Amazon competes in a different industry, and during a different era, from Standard Oil. And its winner take all strategy for the click and the brick world is turning costly - because a strategy like that requires a great deal of investment for warehouses, transportation gear, content acquisition, and so on.

Worse, it pits the company against giants like Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart has been fighting back.

Recently, Wal-Mart scored a big win against : Wal-Mart's on-line sales growth outpaced the sales of Amazon.com for the period ended Dec.31.

Wal-Mart's gains against Amazon.com follow a well-crafted strategy, which includes the acquisition of on-line search technologies and the building of warehouses.In 2013, for instance, @WalmartLabs, Wal-Marts e-commerce technology arm, acquired four start-ups: Torbit, a cloud-based website accelerator service; Inkiru, a predictive intelligence platform; OneOps, a cloud based automation technology; and Tasty Labs.

Currently, Wal-Mart is about to acquire Adchemy, a search engine marketer.

Amazon remains the on-line leader, beating Wal-Mart by 7-1. Nonetheless, Wal-Mart's strategy demonstrates that Amazon doesn't have a sustainable competitive advantage. Any retailer with deep pockets to recruit or acquire the best talent can make a foray into its markets.

And Wal-Mart isn't just any retailer. It is the biggest retailer in the world. And it got there by competing on pricing.

That's what makes Amazon's problem big. It has been accustomed to competing on razor-thin margins, focusing on sales growth rather than profitability. Wal-Mart's foray into Amazon's markets may change the rules of the game- it will become extremely difficult for Amazon to raise the price of its "bundle," or worse, it could fuel a price war that may extinguish Amazon's thin profit margins.

Amazon.com versus Wal-Mart Stores

Source: .Finance.com

Either prospect isn't good for Wall Street, which has been on edge since Amazon's last earnings report, sending its shares south.

Amazon has a serious problem to solve.

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Amazon has a big problem--Wal-Mart. For years, Amazon has been expanding the scale and scope of its operation, both horizontally and vertically-a strategy that resembles that of Standard Oil's in the late 19th century. The problem is that Amazon competes in a different industry, and during a different era, from Standard Oil.

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is announcing plans for a new fulfillment center, as the e-tailer giant continues to bring its products closer to its customers and enable faster delivery

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Amazon is announcing plans for a new fulfillment center, as the e-tailer giant continues to bring its products closer to its customers and enable faster delivery.