![last day - last day last day - last day](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SoJuoQXOvY8/VWpp2s5mIcI/AAAAAAAAIdA/BwkBqK0mGfo/s400/Ls%2Bfirst%2Band%2Blast%2Bday%2Bof%2Bschool%2Bcopy.jpg)
Amazon. Fresh Is Jeff Bezos' Last Mile Quest For Total Retail Domination. The first thing you notice about Jeff Bezos is how he strides into a room. A surprisingly diminutive figure, clad in blue jeans and a blue pinstripe button- down, Bezos flings open the door with an audible whoosh and instantly commands the space with his explosive voice, boisterous manner, and a look of total confidence. How are you?" he booms, in a way that makes it sound like both a question and a high- decibel announcement. Each of the dozen buildings on Amazon's Seattle campus is named for a milestone in the company's history—Wainwright, for instance, honors its first customer. Bezos and I meet in a six- floor structure known as Day One North.
Amazon upended retail, but CEO Jeff Bezos — who just bought The Washington Post for $250 million — insists it’s still 'Day One.' What comes next? A relentless. Prime Day is a one-day event held on July 15, 2015, where Prime members can find more deals than Black Friday. Here are the top stories from this past week's Day in Rock report Guns N' Roses Reportedly Reuniting For Coachella, Stadium Tour In 2016 Original Guns N' Roses. Remember back on Day 10 when I was talking about the weather, or lack thereof, and 'the calm before the storm'… We woke yesterday morning to life in a snow globe!
![last day - last day last day - last day](http://static.ow.ly/photos/original/a4KEK.jpg)
The name means far more than the fact that Amazon, like every company in the universe, opened on a certain date (in this case, it's July 1. No, Day One is a central motivating idea for Bezos, who has been reminding the public since his first letter to shareholders in 1. Day One in the development of both the Internet and his ambitious retail enterprise. In one recent update for shareholders he went so far as to assert, with typical I- know- something- you- don't flair, that "the alarm clock hasn't even gone off yet." So I ask Bezos: "What exactly does the rest of day one look like?" He pauses to think, then exclaims, "We're still asleep at that!"He's a liar. Amazon is a company that is anything but asleep. Amazon, in fact, is an eyes- wide- open army fighting—and winning—a battle that no one can map as well as its general.
![last day - last day last day - last day](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g7S27TN-gOs/VTKlDpESnHI/AAAAAAAAOYw/0MLcsWVdF8M/s1600/teacher%2Bshirts%2B-%2Blast%2Bday%2Bof%2Bschool%2Bautographs.png)
Yes, it is still the ruthless king of books—especially after Apple's recent loss in a book price- fixing suit. But nearly two decades after its real day one, the e- commerce giant has evolved light- years from being just a book peddler. More than 2. 09 million active customers rely on Amazon for everything from flat- panel TVs to dog food.
U.S. tax law allows television preachers to get away with almost anything. We know this from personal experience. Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption will not.
Over the past five years, the retailer has snatched up its most sophisticated competition—shoe seller Zappos and Quidsi, parent of such sites as Diapers. Soap. com, Wag. com, and Beauty. Bar. com. It has purchased the robot maker Kiva Systems, because robots accelerate the speed at which Amazon can assemble customer orders, sometimes getting it down to 2. Annual sales have quadrupled over the same period to a whopping $6. Along the way, incidentally, Amazon also became the world's most trusted company. Consumers voted it so in a recent Harris Poll, usurping the spot formerly held by Apple.
Amazon has done a lot more than become a stellar retailer. It has reinvented, disrupted, redefined, and renovated the global marketplace. Last year, e- commerce sales around the world surpassed $1 trillion for the first time; Amazon accounted for more than 5% of that volume.
This seemingly inevitable shift has claimed plenty of victims, with more to come. Big- box retailers like Circuit City and Best Buy bore the brunt of Amazon's digital assault, while shopping- mall mainstays such as Sears and JCPenney have also seen sales tank.
Malls in general, which once seemed to offer some shelter from the online pummeling, have been hollowed out. By Green Street Advisors' estimate, 1. It has become painfully clear that the chance to sift through bins of sweaters simply isn't enough of a draw for shoppers anymore. It has been this way in retail forever," says Kevin Sterneckert, a research VP at Gartner who focuses on shopping trends, and who lays out a strategy that should blow nobody's mind: "If you don't innovate and address who your customers are, you become irrelevant." And now that means fending off threats from every phone, tablet, and laptop on the planet. Amazon's increasing dominance is now less about what it sells than how it sells. And that portends a second wave of change that will further devastate competitors and transform retail again.
It's not just "1- Click Ordering" on Amazon's mobile app, which is tailor- made for impulse buying. It's not just the company's "Subscribe & Save" feature, which lets customers schedule regular replenishments of essentials like toilet paper and deodorant. It's not just Amazon's "Lockers" program, in which huge metal cabinets are installed at 7- Elevens and Staples in select cities, letting customers securely pick up packages at their convenience instead of risking missed (or stolen) deliveries. Amazon. Fresh is really a Trojan horse. It's not about winning in grocery services.
It's about dominating the market in same- day deliveries. No, it's all this, plus something more primal: speed. Bezos has turned Amazon into an unprecedented speed demon that can give you anything you want. Right. Now. To best understand Amazon's aggressive game plan—and its true ambitions—you need to begin with Amazon Prime, the company's $7. I think Amazon Prime is the best bargain in the history of shopping," Bezos tells me, noting that the service now includes free shipping on more than 1.
Prime members also gain access to more than 4. Instant Video programs and 3.
Kindle Owners' Lending Library. As annoying as this might be to Netflix, it is not intended primarily as an assault on that business. Rather, Bezos is willing to lose money on shipping and services in exchange for loyalty. Those 1. 0 million Prime members (up from 5 million two years ago, according to Morningstar) are practically addicted to using Amazon.
The average Prime member spends an astounding $1,2. Amazon, which is $7. Members' purchases and membership fees make up more than a third of Amazon's U. S. profit. And memberships are projected to rise 1. Nadia Shouraboura of Hointer, a new store that represents how retail must adapt in the Age of Amazon. Robbie Schwietzer, VP of Prime, is more candid than his boss when explaining Prime's true purpose: "Once you become a Prime member, your human nature takes over. You want to leverage your $7.
Not only do you buy more, but you buy in a broader set of categories. You discover all the selections we have that you otherwise wouldn't have thought to look to Amazon for." And what you buy at Amazon you won't buy from your local retailer. Prime is phase one in a three- tiered scheme that also involves expanding Amazon's local fulfillment capabilities and a nascent program called Amazon. Fresh. Together, these pillars will remake consumers' expectations about retail. Bezos seems to relish the coming changes. In the old world, you could make a living by hoping that your customer didn't know whether your price was actually competitive.
That's a very"—Bezos pauses for a second to rummage for the least insulting word—"tenuous strategy in the new world. Now] you can't convince people you have the low price; you actually have to have the low price. You can't persuade people that your delivery speeds are fast; you actually have to have fast delivery speeds!" With that last challenge, he erupts in a thunderous laugh, throwing his cleanly depilated head so far back that you can see the dark fillings on his upper molars. He really does seem to know something the rest of us don't.
We're still asleep, he says? The alarm clock at Amazon went off hours ago.
Whether the rest of the retail world has woken up yet is another question. Amazon's 1- million- square- foot Phoenix fulfillment center produces a steady and syncopated rhythm. It is the turn of mechanical conveyor belts, the thud of boxes hitting metal, the beeping of forklifts moving to and fro, and the hum of more than 1. This is the sound of speed—a sonic representation of what it takes to serve millions of customers scattered across the globe. In centers like this one, of which there are 8. Amazon has built the complex machinery to make sure a product will ship out in less than 2.
From that click, a set of algorithms calculates the customer's location, desired shipping speed, and product availability; it then dispatches the purchase request to "pickers" on duty at the nearest fulfillment center. The system directs the new order to the picker who is closest on the floor to that product, popping up with a bleep on the picker's handheld scanner gun. These men and women roam the sea of product shelves with carts, guided by Amazon's steady hand to the precise location of the product on the color- coded shelves. The picker gathers the item and puts it into a bin with other customer orders. And from there, the item zooms off on a conveyor belt to a boxing station, where a computer instructs a worker on what size box to grab and what items belong in that box. After the packer completes an order, the word success lights up in big green letters on a nearby computer screen. Then the package goes back on a conveyor, where the fastest delivery method is calculated by scanning the box, which is then kicked down a winding chute to the appropriate truck.
The process is efficient, but still lower tech than it could be. Although Amazon shelled out $7. Kiva robots, it says it's still "evaluating" how to deploy the bots, and they're nowhere to be seen here. Fulfillment by Amazon" is still a very human endeavor—and the company's creativity thrives within that limitation. A team at the Phoenix center is constantly thinking of ways to chip away at the 2.
For instance, when products arrive from Amazon's vendors and the 2 million third- party merchants who sell their goods on the site, workers now scan them into Amazon's inventory system (again, with a handheld gun) instead of entering the details manually. Also, products have been stowed on shelves in what otherwise might appear to be a random way—for example, a single stuffed teddy bear might be next to a college biology book—because it reduces the potential distance a worker must trek between popular products that might be ordered together. Small tweaks like these have an impact: In the past two years, Amazon has reduced the time it took to move a product by a quarter.
During the past holiday season, the company processed 3. These centers aren't just about warehouse speed, though: They're also about proximity.