Twenty-three – mid-twenties, early twenties, definitely not teens – it’s a difficult age but being worth a cool $815 billion makes celebrating this year’s birthday a breeze. Amazon turns 23 on 05 Jul 2018, and we’re celebrating with 23 facts that you might not have known about the marketplace dominating the world.
1. They have as many as 6,000 dogs in at their Seattle HQ
2. Amazon was nearly named Cadabra
3. The instantly recognisable orange arrow represents a smile from A to Z
4. Amazon Smile offers online shoppers to chance to nominate a charity that Amazon will donate 0.5% to
5. It has an army of over 45,000 robots
6. Last year, Amazon Prime delivered a thermometer in eight minutes
7. They have a free screenwriting tool
8. In the early days, a bell would ring every time a purchase was made. They stopped that pretty quick.
9. One of its buildings is named Bigfoot
10. Each Amazon Prime aeroplane can hold over one million Echo Dots
11. There are more than 45,000 workers in the Seattle HQ alone
12. They have ‘door desks’
13. The original Prime Day was held in celebration of Amazon’s 20th birthday
14. Bezos started Amazon in his garage
15. A book was once listed for $23 million
16. An early bug allowed shoppers to order a negative quantity of books – with Amazon owing the shopper money
17. Amazon went down for 40 minutes in 2013, losing an estimated $4.8 million.
18. In the early days, Bezos would personally deliver packages to the post office
19. Relentless.com takes you to Amazon’s home page
20. All employees spend two days every two years working on the customer service desk
21. Project teams are limited to the number of people who could be comfortably fed by two pizzas (one?)
22. The rainforest covers 2.1 million square miles
23. Rumour has it that HQ2 will be announced as a 23rd birthday treat