17 thoughts on “Amazon 1999”

  1. Something I’d like to see Amazon change is their recommended products that are on “Patricia’s Amazon” and in the emails they send. I look at products that I don’t ever want to own, and they — or related products — keep showing up in my recommendations. The same book suggestions arrive over and over in my Amazon emails because I happened to look at some author’s page. Also, when I buy a gift for, say a new baby, I keep getting infant clothing recommendations. They’ve taken away that option they used to have to remove items out of the recommendations, but I don’t miss that because it was a tedious process.

    • Actually I found that option yesterday in the top right corner. It said edit in smallish letters and had a slider beside it. Once I toggled it on, I was able to delete a bunch of recommended stuff. 🙂

      • Ah, I found it. I had never noticed they had an overall “refine your recommendations” link … much easier than the old method. Thanks.

        • You’re welcome. I was glad to find it. I needed to get rid of some old recommendations based off too many free books I’d picked up. 🙂

  3. Thanks!

    Fun to see the building I worked in again — I think it has since been demolished. That’s definitely the man the way I remember him.

    FWIW, customer since 1995, and I was already retired from Amazon when that piece was done.

  4. Never thought to look before, but with my current email address, I’ve apparently been an Amazon customer since 1998.

    Some interesting notes from the Video… it somewhat predicts the .com burst, but it turns out Amazon stock has still gone up 20x since then. It mentions that with it’s previous market cap, Amazon would have to sell all the books, CDs and movies in the world to justify it. They’re close to that, but really, apparently they didn’t realize Amazon would sell more than just media products.

    It mentions Sears and wonders about how can Amazon possibly be worth as much. We now know how that competition turned out.

    They made a big deal about how Amazon could in the future sell information on their customer’s buying habits to other companies, but completely missed that selling the infrastructure driving it all in the form of AWS was actually going to be Amazon’s big money maker.

    Interesting comparisons, for sure.

  5. At about 3:14 minutes:

    “regret minimization framework” – Yes!

    “I want to have lived my life in such a way that when I am 80 years old, I’ve minimized the number of regrets that I have.”

    That is the way!

    That is how I’ve tried to live my life all these decades.

    The video was just before the Dot Com Crash. Amazing.

    BTW, my desk is made of two hollow core doors on easels.

    And the Amazon page says:

    “CUSTOMER SINCE 1997”

    • I’ve been a customer since the ’90s, too, but on my account page it says I’ve been a customer since 2003. Don’t know why. I don’t recall ever closing my account.

    • Just to add. The Nightly Business Report tonight mentioned that Amazon has 75 fulfillment centers. The 60 Minute video mentions “five huge warehouses.”

      What twenty years can change.

      BTW, Patricia, you probably changed your email account in 2003. I’ve been allynh, in one form or another, for close to 50 years.

    • Amazon customer since 1996. I go back far enough that I have two Amazon travel coffee cups that they sent to me as gifts right before Christmas during my first two years as a customer. I have no idea how many other customers got the cups but they remain favorites of mine.

  7. Made me look: I placed my first Amazon order in September of 1998: a Chilton repair manual. It appears that 2002 was when I went all-in for Christmas shopping, benefiting from a family that considers getting just books to be a good Christmas.

  10. Eighteen years later …

    Walmart is still missing the boat.

    And B&N doesn’t have more books – if they ever did …

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