Amazon just crossed $716 billion in revenue and took the No. 1 spot on the Fortune Global 500, ending Walmart’s 12-year run at the top.
Asked what carried the company from a Seattle garage to the biggest business on earth, Jeff Bezos kept coming back to two words. Not cloud computing. Not robots. Not artificial intelligence. If you have ever purchased anything from Amazon, you are the object of his obsession.
Customer obsession
Bezos put “customer obsession” in Amazon’s first shareholder letter in 1997, the year the company went public, and he has been saying it ever since. That letter mentioned the customer 25 times.
Carmine Gallo, who has read every letter Bezos wrote to shareholders, counted the word more than 500 times across them. In one recent interview, Bezos said the phrase 10 times. Amazon changes and improves almost everything else about itself constantly. It has never changed that.
A warning and a mission
Bezos said Amazon would chase long-term market leadership over short-term profit, spend hard when it saw an opening, and ignore the quarterly scoreboard. Customer obsession was never about the easy win. It meant spending money before the payoff was clear.
Warehouses closer to buyers meant faster delivery. Deeper inventory meant more selection. Every dollar bought fewer steps between wanting a thing and having it on the porch. For years the spending made Amazon look reckless, even unprofitable. Bezos let customers settle the argument, and they kept coming back.
Customer satisfaction
Bezos likes to say that satisfied customers are not satisfied for long. Give people two-day shipping, and soon it’s the norm and feels slow. A return process becomes a right, and if it is made completely painless, it is too much of a hassle to shop elsewhere.
That appetite for easy shopping is the engine, and Amazon spent 30 years feeding it, moving from books to electronics to cloud computing to artificial intelligence, always chasing what shoppers would want once the last upgrade became ordinary.
Amazon has “trained” shoppers to expect speed, choice, reviews, tracking and simple returns, and the rest of retail had to match it or lose the sale. Faster shipping, bigger online catalogs, buy-online-pickup-in-store, generous return windows. It was an excellent plan for consumers in the long run. Every other store has to up their game, knowing you could take your money to Amazon instead.
There is still a place for shopping at brick-and-mortar establishments, especially if you can slash expenses while you do it. Join AARP now and save hundreds on dining, travel, eyeglasses, prescriptions and more. Just $15/year with auto-renewal.
Should you be worried?
Of course not. But maybe other retailers should worry. An executive obsessed with customers is the reason Amazon has one-click checkout and next-day delivery.
Bezos decided in 1997 that customers would never be satisfied, put it in writing, and built the biggest company on earth on that assumption. He told shareholders who Amazon would answer to first, and has spent nearly 30 years making everyone else answer to the customer.
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