How 19 years of Amazon Prime satisfied our need for speed

Just as Engadget was pushing to publish its first posts, I used a freshly minted English degree to work at an independent bookstore in Los Angeles. In seemingly unrelated news, Amazon had just announced its first profitable year after switching from selling books to selling ‘everything’ four years ago. (Many books still sell.)

Our bookstore has done a good job keeping the shelves stocked with a balance of more worthy popular hits and lower, better prices. But we couldn’t have every book a customer could ask for, so we offered to order every title in print. If the distributor had it, it would take about a week to get in, longer if we had to go through the publisher. This seemed fine to most customers.

But sometimes “about a week” was too long. A few people immediately came out and said, “No, I’ll order it from Amazon.” In 2005, Amazon launched Prime, the membership program that, for $79 a year, gives customers unlimited two-day shipping on most orders. At the launch, CEO Jeff Bezos called it “all-you-can-eat express delivery.” Little did anyone know at the time how hungry the world was for Amazon’s brand of convenience. And now, nearly two decades later, we’ve seen the changes taking over that buffet—in labor, retail, and the entire customer experience.

Prime was not an overnight success. It is appreciated that six years after launch, only four million households had paid for the service. But 10 years later, in 2021, Bezos claimed it has amassed 200 million members worldwide. Beyond that milestone, Amazon hasn’t published its members, but the number is likely higher now.

That shipping should be both free and fast has become an expectation, and no company has done more to change the logistics landscape than Amazon. The company independently operates over a hundred warehouses in the US, each ranging from 600,000 to four million square feet. Each of them employs between 1,000 and 1,500 people the peopleand an army of about 750,000 men robots work together with people in many places.

The company operates a fleet of cargo planes, is experimenting with drone deliveries and has thousands of delivery vans – yet none of these Amazon-branded vans are driven by actual employees. Rather, separate companies known as delivery partners (DSP), subcontractor drivers to drive these vans. Amazon rent 1.5 million people full or part time (with one million in USA), but these figures do not include independent contractors and temporary staff. In addition to the DSP program, Amazon Flex allows people to use their own cars to deliver packages of smiles to front porches. The company also outsources delivery to traditional suppliers, relying on both UPS and the US Postal Service, with the latter forced to deliver packages on Sunday since 2013

Such massive orchestration to deliver Stanley Quenchers and Pimple Patches faster than anyone has paid off. However, it is difficult to look at growth and revenue figures without considering the human cost. Contract drivers pees in bottles as meeting quotas leaves no time for bathroom breaks. Workers suffer serious injuries in automated warehouses. The company is being sued for retaliatory firing, intrusive employee surveillance practices and failure to follow COVID safety guidelines. Amazon is back on the 2023 Dirty Dozen list for workplace safety, according to the advocacy group National COSH. And while it has taken steps to improve, with better pay, the company has taken anti-union action typical of a massive corporation, joining others in calling the National Labor Relations Board “unconstitutional.”

In addition to labor issues, Amazon’s dominance has made life more difficult for retail businesses in general, especially for the big chains. The Amazon effect has become shorthand for e-commerce’s mall hollowing out of traditional retail. Even businesses that partner with Amazon aren’t doing well. Third-party sellers on the site are subject to penalties and have to deal with increasing fees that sometimes place them out of business. Sellers who do represent well have seen copied products and is sold by Amazon’s private label. Famous partnerships have had poor results, such as when Borders outsourced its early web sales or exclusivity deal with Toys ‘R’ Us. Of course, Borders no longer exists, and Toys ‘R’ Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017.

Trying to beat Amazon on speed and price is pointless. Joining them is unwise. So retailers compete in other ways. At the bookstore, we focused on our strengths: a diverse staff with different talents who could gauge a customer’s reading tastes and put a good book in their hands. If someone walks into our store circa 2005 and says they’re into fantasy, there’s a good chance our book buyer will give them a copy of George RR Martin’s latest book, years before HBO had anything to do with it. with this.

We had a curated zine section and hosted live events with bestselling authors, founders of cult magazines and local writers. But mostly we benefited from people who wanted more from their shopping than just speed and convenience, people who didn’t mind if it took a week to get a book as long as it came with a little local community. Some just wanted to look at books while sitting under the tree (there is a tree in the middle of the store), petting a cat (in my time it was Lucy) and listening to what we thought were pretty bad playlists.

today, Skylight Books is still a force of creativity and enthusiasm in the Los Feliz neighborhood and has even expanded into an annex next door. Overall, after the initial casualties of the retail apocalypse and COVID, independent bookstores are doing well, with established names staying put and opening new stores. All over the retail industry, big chains continue to close locations, but independent retail seems to increasing. Personally, I enjoy the new bakeries, breweries, and wholesale stores that have sprung up around the neighborhoods where I now live.

I can’t, as a commercial writer, ignore that a decent portion of my work directs readers to Amazon’s website. The company plays a role in displaying the very words you’re reading, as Engadget’s site is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) through Yahoo’s cloud partnership. The company is one of the largest on the planet, the second largest employer in the US, and a good portion of every retail dollar spent in the US goes into Amazon’s coffers.

With the acquisition of over 500 Whole Foods stores, Amazon is doing well in the physical retail sector. Yet the company has been reluctant to win when it tries to fabricate other retail experiences. Amazon Books, Amazon style and Amazon 4-Star were small retail spaces that attempted to leverage Amazon’s brand, vast array of shopper data, and cutting-edge retail technology. At their peak, these stores consisted of about 70 physical locations, all of which are now closed. Cashless Amazon Go still has more than 20 locations in the U.S., but Amazon closed nine of them in 2023 and has not announced plans to open more.

These omissions may be statistically unavoidable; more than half of new businesses fail before reaching the 10-year mark. But perhaps these stores failed because, as physical spaces, they couldn’t capitalize on Amazon’s core strength: effortless shopping. Shopping at Amazon.com is not particularly pleasant. The website is cluttered and confusing. Dodgy products and fake reviews undermine buyer confidence. It’s not even the cheapest place I’m shopping. But this 1-Click™ buy button and turbo delivery makes things appear on our doorstep as if they were sliding there on greased rails.

Yet when people muster the energy to leave their homes, they may hope for more: human experiences created by people in their own neighborhood who do what they do out of passion, not because market data suggests that in a given sector can receive dollars. With its trillion-dollar valuation, Amazon isn’t going anywhere, but under its huge shadow there’s still room for businesses that focus on the human element of commercial transactions, places where people might want to spend some of their time. The speed and convenience of Amazon may have saved them.

I’m celebrating Engadget’s 20th Anniversarywe take a look back at the products and services that changed the industry since March 2, 2004.

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