How The Everything Store won The Everything War.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jramale. When Jeff Bezos left Wall Street to start Amazon in 1994. The most common question he got was,

what's the internet? Fast forward to today and Amazon is of course the country's

leading online retailer.

In 2022 the company made up almost 38% of the U.S. e-commerce market.

Walmart, its closest competitor, made up just over 6% according to insider intelligence. In her new book, The Everything War,

the Wall Street Journal's Dana Matioli documents the tactics she says had allowed Amazon to dominate.

You know, the Book Chronicles pervasive situations where different teams at Amazon are helping

themselves to data from sellers on the site or others that they could then use to reverse engineer

their own best hits for Amazon's brands. I could go into an example that what

happened with Trader Joe's. Yeah, let's talk about that. You write about a Trader Joe's executive who moves over to Amazon gets hired there and is pressured to reveal trade secrets about that chain's snacks.

Specifically, which ones are the most popular.

And you write, for six months,

the employee's manager hounded her for information

about Trader Joe's best selling products.

She tried to deflect, but the pressure kept ratcheting up.

There's even a demand that the employee

email documents she had retained from her old job. Is that kind of thing pretty

common at Amazon? The pressure that these employees are under at Amazon is at a level I haven't

seen anywhere else in corporate America.

You know, I've covered companies in some respect for nearly 18 years at the Wall Street

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