Amazon (Part 1): The Unfulfillment Company.
Unf*cking The Republic
UNFTR Media
4.9 • 683 Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2022
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The first of a two part series on Amazon. In many ways, Amazon is the logical extension of America’s perverted version of neoliberal capitalism. The self-described libertarian founder Jeff Bezos created a company with nearly 100% brand recognition that has permeated our daily lives in obvious ways and some not so obvious ways. In Part 1 we examine Amazon’s relationship with its hometown of Seattle, its obsessive focus on the customer to the exclusion of all else and how it built its power base in Washington D.C.
Chapters
Intro: 00:00:20
Chapter One: Seattle Not-so Super Sonic: 00:07:33
Chapter Two: Customer Centric: 00:17:32
Chapter Three: Gaming the System: 00:25:44
Coffee Break 00:19:22
Post Show Musings: 00:33:23
Pod Love: 00:56:21
Book Love: 00:57:02
Outro: 00:57:19
Resources
Alec MacGillis: The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell
Danny Meyer: Setting the Table
The Seattle Times: Seattle ended decade with faster growth than suburbs, reversing a 100-year trend
The New York Times: The Amazon That Customers Don't See
The Intercept: Amazon Gets Tax Breaks While Its Employees Rely On Food Stamps, New Data Shows
The Guardian: Top Amazon boss privately advised US government on web portal worth billions to tech firm
The Hill: Monopoly critics decry ‘Amazon amendment’
Book Love
Alec MacGillis: Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
Pod Love
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just think, Max, because of us, everyone tomorrow morning will jump out of bed and jump into the shower and grab a quick breakfast and jump into their cars and get on the freeway and rush to work, just like they do every day in the year. |
| 0:12.2 | Do you think we did the right thing, 99? |
| 0:16.9 | U and FDRDR Jeffrey Bezos |
| 0:21.6 | Jeffrey Bezos |
| 0:23.6 | Jeffrey Bezos |
| 0:26.6 | You did it |
| 0:29.6 | Hi there, who are you? |
| 0:31.6 | I'm Jeff Bezos |
| 0:32.6 | And what is your claim to fame? |
| 0:34.6 | I'm the founder of Amazon.com |
| 0:36.6 | Where did you get an founder of Amazon.com. |
| 0:39.7 | Where did you get an idea for Amazon.com? |
| 0:44.6 | Well, three years ago, I was in New York City working for a quantitative hedge fund. |
| 0:49.8 | When I came across the startling statistic, the web usage was growing at 2,300% a year. |
| 0:56.0 | So I decided I would try and find a business plan that made sense in the context of that growth. And I picked books as the first best product to sell online, which are making a list of like 20 different products that you might be able to sell. |
| 1:02.0 | And books were great as the first best, because books are incredibly unusual in one respect. |
| 1:07.0 | And that is that there are more items in the book category and there are items |
| 1:11.6 | than any other category by far. Music is number two. There are about 200,000 active music |
| 1:16.7 | CDs at any given time. But in the book space, there are more than 3 million different |
| 1:21.1 | books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, and more than |
| 1:25.6 | one and a half million in English alone. |
| 1:28.3 | So when you have that many items, you can literally build a store online that couldn't exist |
... |
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