---
product_id: 211810
title: "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"
price: "€ 48.05"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.pt/products/211810-the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon
store_origin: PT
region: Portugal
---

# Definitive Amazon origin story 300+ insider interviews Epic rise of tech retail giant The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

**Price:** € 48.05
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Summary

> 🚀 Dive into the story that launched a trillion-dollar empire — don’t miss your front-row seat!

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
- **How much does it cost?** € 48.05 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.pt](https://www.desertcart.pt/products/211810-the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon)

## Best For

- Customers looking for quality international products

## Why This Product

- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Key Features

- • **Unmatched Insider Access:** Brad Stone’s 300+ interviews reveal Amazon’s secret culture and Bezos’ relentless vision.
- • **Customer Obsession Unveiled:** Explore Bezos’ uncompromising focus on customer experience and innovation.
- • **Definitive Business Biography:** The authoritative account of how Amazon transformed retail and tech forever.
- • **A Must-Read for Millennial Leaders:** Gain insights into disruptive leadership and long-term strategic thinking.
- • **From Garage Startup to Global Giant:** Witness the gritty early days and explosive growth that reshaped e-commerce.

## Overview

The Everything Store by Brad Stone is the definitive biography of Amazon and Jeff Bezos, chronicling the company’s rise from a humble online bookseller to a global retail and tech powerhouse. Based on extensive interviews and insider access, it reveals the ambitious culture, strategic risks, and customer obsession that fueled Amazon’s disruptive growth. This used book in good condition offers millennial professionals a compelling look at innovation, leadership, and the making of a modern business icon.

## Description

The authoritative account of the rise of desertcart and its intensely driven founder, Jeff Bezos, praised by the Seattle Times as "the definitive account of how a tech icon came to life." desertcart.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted desertcart to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former desertcart employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at desertcart. Compared to tech's other elite innovators -- Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg -- Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading desertcart into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing. The Everything Store is the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.

Review: Lively and interesting. - "What we are doing here is building a giant rocket ship, and we're going to light the fuse. Then it's either going to go to the moon or leave a giant smoking crater in the ground. Either way I want to be here when it happens." (p. 72) So commented an desertcart engineer in the late 1990s. I really like this book. Best corporate biography I ever have read. (Okay it beats Lee Iacocca's autobiography that I read in 1986.) Biographer Brad Stone, a veteran financial journalist and longtime observer of desertcart, conducted 300 interviews for this book -- a staggering sweep of research. It shows. His knowledge of desertcart culture comes across with an insider's familiarity but an outsider's objectivity. The narrative goes deep in places, and yet it bounces along, carried by personal quotes and anecdotes. It's darn interesting. The story is about Bezos the person and desertcart the business. It's rife with Bezo's uncanny vision, with allusions to how he got that way. Problems at desertcart come through too -- it's not all glory. Some problems are strategic in terms of product buying and selling, finances, and technical execution; and other problems concern desertcart's disquieting treatment of employees, suppliers, and smaller rivals in markets where desertcart wields major power. The story frequently gets personal looking at Jeff Bezos, but mercifully, the author stops just short of sensationalism or blind hero-worship or a masked publicity stunt for desertcart. The Everything Book is none of those things. Brad Stone's narrative admires desertcart's innovation and behemoth power build-up. He spends a lot of time on the first few years of the world wide web's emergence as a popular place to play, communicate, and shop. The narrative pauses briefly along the way at iconic cultural artifacts like Netscape's IPO in 1995. The book revivifies my days dialing up on my PC modem and using Netscape to browse desertcart and many other websites. Someday, that memory will be the stuff of a museum-goer's revelry or curiosity. The book strikes up that nostalgia right now, and that adds to the fun in the early chapters. The desertcart story launches in the mid-1990s when it was a family affair run by Bezos the now ex-financier and his wife, MacKenzie, out of a garage in Bellevue, Washington. Bezos "wanted to build he next Sears,'a lasting company that was a major force in retail." (p. 75). Would anyone now snicker at that? This is no ordinary garage hobby -- never was. We get a feel for the ground-level entrepreneurship too, where Bezos figured out how to elbow into a bookselling marketplace that was highly institutionalized, with relatively low profit margins. Ground-level entrepreneurship turns into "Jeff against the world," a cultural theme at desertcart, one executive reported years later. (p. 116) In an early example, Bezos risked industry resistance when he insisted on publishing customer reviews, whether favorable or unfavorable. Stone writes, "One important element in the early vision was that customers could leave written evaluations of any product, a more egalitarian and credible version of the old Montgomery Ward catalog reviews of its own suppliers..." (p. 24-25) "Naturally, some of the reviews were negative. In speeches, Bezos later recalled getting an angry letter from an executive at a book publisher implying that Bezos didn't understand that his business was to sell books, not trash them. 'We saw it very differently,' Bezos said. 'When I read that letter, I thought, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions." (p. 38) Stone displays the desertcart culture as bursting with creative tension and customer obsession that produces. Sometimes desertcart also missed, just narrowly, financial overreach and spinout. Do you remember the news stories in the late 90s about desertcart having not turned a profit after 16 quarters or something like that, despite a high volume of activity? And all the talk about Bezos insisting on playing a long game, buying and holding "waterfront property" on the internet, so that somebody else wouldn't get there first, while desertcart's business developed? This book shows all the expansionary fervor of those years, including a trove of corporate acquisitions and investments like Pets.com and Drugstore.com. Crucially, there came a turning point in 1999: "Kelyn Brannon, desertcart's chief accounting officer at the time, says that she and Joy Covey pulled Bezos into a meeting to show him a form of financial analysis called common-sizing the income statement; it expressed each part of the balance sheet as a percentage of value to sales. The calculations showed that at its current rate, desertcart wouldn't become profitable for decades. 'It was an aha moment,' Brannon says. Bezos agreed to lift his foot from the accelerator and begin to move the company toward profitability." (p. 91) desertcart turned in its first profitable quarter in late 2001, seven years after its founding. While the accountants and Jeff fretted at the top over the financial pace, the reader of Stone's book gets a feel for the factory floor too -- an exciting whoosh of making history, and also, grueling work weeks: "The young CEO liked to recite, 'You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at desertcart you can't choose two out of three." (p. 46) Twice in the initial chapters, we hear about "Save Santa" campaigns involving the abandonment of what was left of personal and family life, in order to compensate for explosive holiday sales volume and staff under-capacity. So if you ever wondered how your order "click" got your goods shipped so quickly in the holiday crush: "The rapid growth once again required the company to initiate the Save Santa operation. Employees said good-bye to their families and headed off on two-week shifts to staff the customer-service phone lines or work in distribution centers across the country. Frugal to the bone, desertcart packed them two to a hotel room. To some, it was the greatest experience they had ever had at the company. Others hated it and complained vociferously." (p. 94-95) If that sounds hard on employees, the Everything Store says yes, it is. "At ten years old, desertcart could be a deeply unhappy place to work. The stock price was flat, there were strict limits on annual raises, and the pace was unrelenting. Employees felt underpaid and overworked. When the new development centers opened in Palo Alto and elsewhere, the joke inside desertcart was that it was a necessary move because everyone in Seattle was aware of how abjectly miserable employees at the company were." (p. 201) Another through-line is that, like the better-known Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Bezos had a passion for the customer experience and would tolerate nothing less from his subordinate managers: "With Christmas sales ramping up and hold times on desertcart phone lines once again growing longer, Bezos began the meeting by asking Price what the customer wait times were. Price then violated a cardinal rule at desertcart: he assured Bezos that they were well under a minute but without offering much in the way of proof. "Really?' Bezos said. 'Let's see.' On the speakerphone in the middle of the conference table, he called desertcart's 800 number. Incongruously cheerful hold music filled the room. Bezos took his watch off and made a deliberate show of tracking the time. A brutal minute passed, then two. Other execs fidgeted uncomfortably while Price furtively picked up his cell phone and quietly tried to summon his subordinates. Bezos's face grew red; the vein in his forehead, a hurricane warning system, popped out and introduced itself to the room. Around four and a half minutes passed, but according to multiple people at the meeting who related the story, the wait seemed interminable. "Eventually a cheerful voice blurted out, 'Hello, desertcart.com!' Bezos said, "I'm just calling to check," and slammed down the phone. Then he tore into Price, accusing him of incompetence and lying. "Price was gone about ten months later. "(p. 113) Stone's book shows that I have been sheltered from all that in my place as a happy customer. I'll be more sympathetic next time desertcart delivers their customarily fine service. While I find it disconcerting to hear grueling tales of woe inside desertcart's walls, the fact remains that as a customer, I have been an desertcart enthusiast. That makes this book all the more interesting for me. I have never worked at desertcart, nor invested there, nor do I know anyone who did. But I have appreciated desertcart for more than a decade. When Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal, I fretted; but when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, I thought hmmm, this could get interesting. That's how I felt as the book unfolded, and I was not disappointed. Further, the Audible.com version is perfectly performed. I recommended it to a business associate already on day one, when I was only a few chapters in. Speaking of day one, I quite enjoyed Stone's recitation on the door to Jeff Bezos's office: "There is so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way. Jeff Bezos" (p. 9)
Review: Good book - worth purchasing! - So, I just finished reading "The Everything Store" by Brad Stone. I am not a fan of elaborate and long-winded reviews about whether a book is worth reading or not. I'll make it easy for you - this one is. It's a good read as a business book, as a tech book, and it is helpful if you're interested in Seattle history. I'll go into more detail below if you're reading what the "self absorbed internet troll" Robby Delaware thinks.* If you're like most people who peruse reviews, I hope this helps. I was contemplating writing a too-cool-for-school review that mentioned the time I thought I ran into Bezos in Ballard on the sidewalk in back of the BofA building. But I didn't. ... Now for some of my self absorbed ramblings. This isn't what I liked about the book, more about what I found surprising. The author himself acknowledges that this is one of the first complete histories of the company, and I would wager that there will be an afterword to future releases of this book. I've been looking forward to the release this book for some time. I downloaded it as soon as it was released for Kindle. I began reading this book in a sort of unusual way. I began reading it by kind of keeping a mental checklist in my own mind. I was curious if the author, who has covered desertcart for a long time, would omit certain things. The book is clearly biased towards desertcart and Bezos - which isn't surprising and doesn't diminish the appeal of the book. Still, I couldn't help but think that portions of the book were clearly written by someone who wasn't familiar with Seattle culture and by someone who didn't quite view events the same way that many other people did. I took notes while reading the book, and here's a list of things that I found surprising about the book while I was reading it: I was very surprised that a number of relatively small controversies since 2008 didn't make it into this book. I believe that the absence of these stories is unfortunate, and won't help those seeking a full understanding of the company. desertcart, since the rise of social media, has become the source of a number of controversies that I like to call "Twitter worthy." Many of you may recall stories like desertcart Japan selling whale meat, or a pedophile self-publishing an e-book how-to guide, or the remote removal of Orwell books from Kindle readers for DRM reasons, or the deranking of Gay and Lesbian literature. While these stories in an of themselves aren't the kind of stories that are likely to make it on the front page of a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal, these stories will be remembered. One of the only times I ever saw a DRM issue discussed on television was a segment I watched on a cable news show in 2009 about the kid in Minnesota whose Orwell books (and notes) were remotely removed. Why are these stories important, and why do they matter for desertcart? It's simple, because desertcart has grown so large and so global, obscure controversies become easier to understand and even easier to pin on a single retailer. Plus, you've got to feed the twitter beast. Remember the gay/lesbian deranking scandal in 2009? Didn't a hacker do it? Didn't the hacker claim that pulling the urls of gay/lesbian themed books was very easy, and that used an automated script to flag each one as adult? Didn't the hacker claim that he did it for very specific political reasons, and that if you're going to do something like that for political reasons - it's only natural to target desertcart? You see what I'm getting at. There's always been little stories like this - but in an age of twitter and Drudge the smallest story about a holocaust themed board game that one, solitary, third party seller offered can blow up in a spectacular manner. That was the controversies - I was also a little dismayed by how little space was given to desertcart's overall role in the life of Seattle, and I was shocked by how little of a role the Nisqually earthquake played in the narrative of the story. Why is the Nisqually earthquake important? Well, first off, the book claims the earthquake measure 6.9 on the richter scale. I don't believe that's correct - it measured 6.8. Why quibble over something so minor? I believe, strongly, that when future writers look back at the history of Seattle and desertcart's role in city life, the Ash Wednesday earthquake will play a much larger role than anyone who didn't experience it can imagine. That earthquake, which wasn't even that large, trashed a lot of Seattle's commercial real estate. It wasn't just desertcart's PacMed building - there are still boarded up buildings in the city of Seattle today. It is my belief that Paul Allen's South Lake Union project (which had been resounding defeated by Seattle voters during the "commons" debate years earlier) would not have proceeded if it had not been for that earthquake. Which company has dived head first into the transformation of South Lake Union? You guessed it, desertcart. I used to hanging out in the late 90s in South Lake Union. You know who occupied South Lake Union in the late 90s? Dudes who lived in vans, that's who. I went back to that same exact area in 2011 and the place was virtually unrecognizable. This isn't Apple building a UFO shaped HQ in a California suburb that already resembles a golf course combined with the set of "Logan's Run." The project to transform South Lake Union is like Robert Moses on ten lattes - a massive transformation of an urban environment - with desertcart at the center. I could go on about this. About how the book neglected to mention the 1999 WTO conference, when newspaper columnists berated that the "black clad" protestors were "raging against the dot-coms in their own backyard as much as they were against global trade." Or I could mention the recent Seattle Times series from the Blethen family that snootily noted that Bezos is the least engaged civic leader in a city that hosts the majority of America's richest people. But, I won't. You get the picture. I don't think the book covered desertcart's tangled relationship with the city that well. Two other small points - and then I'll stop yakking. The book mentioned Pelago (where I spent seven months as a contract tester) as having been engaged in a mobile search project. I don't think that description is entirely correct. Yes, search was important, and yes, i'd heard that somehow people had or hadn't been asked by Google to come aboard. Still, I remember being told (even as a lowly contract tester) several times - "you might have heard this start-up is about location, email notifications, and tying coupons and deals together. It's not about that. You're not getting it." What's the old saying that was used during the Clinton impeachment trial? "When they say it's not about the sex, it's about the sex!" Pelago might had a lot of energy focused on mobile search - but it was basically an attempt to be a location-based Groupon before Groupon. It's infrastructure fit so well with what Groupon wanted to do that it (surprise!) folded into Groupon. Why did the book make so little mention of the relationship between Groupon and desertcart? Seattle tech blogs like GeekWire are regularly filled with stories of Groupon poaching desertcart executives. Both the rise of Groupon and their quirky and endearing first CEO wouldn't have been possible without desertcart and the existence of Bezos. Wall Street wouldn't have allowed it. One final point before I get off my soapbox. The very end of the book mentions a woman who worked for seven months at desertcart trying to get the company to embrace social media more broadly. Talk about understatement of the year. I've been continually amazed at the haphazard and lazy approach of both desertcart and Apple to social shopping. If Bezos isn't a big fan of music (grabbing assorted cds off a shelf without even looking to see what they are) I'm going to guess he doesn't use or see much need in using social media for shopping - which is a shame, since the Kindle is such a perfect platform for doing this. The @Author program was a great idea - but with zero follow up. The twitter feed hasn't been updated since February. The purchase of Goodreads looks like buying your way out of the problem. Anyways, I could write more. desertcart's a fascinating company, that I have a variety of opinions about. Purchase this book. You won't regret it. *You have to refer to yourself in the third person to be truly self absorbed.

## Features

- Used Book in Good Condition

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #132,256 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #1 in Business Operations Research (Books) #11 in Company Business Profiles (Books) #19 in Business & Organizational Learning |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 12,733 Reviews |

## Images

![The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91SGlRyemXL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Lively and interesting.
*by G***N on October 16, 2013*

"What we are doing here is building a giant rocket ship, and we're going to light the fuse. Then it's either going to go to the moon or leave a giant smoking crater in the ground. Either way I want to be here when it happens." (p. 72) So commented an Amazon engineer in the late 1990s. I really like this book. Best corporate biography I ever have read. (Okay it beats Lee Iacocca's autobiography that I read in 1986.) Biographer Brad Stone, a veteran financial journalist and longtime observer of Amazon, conducted 300 interviews for this book -- a staggering sweep of research. It shows. His knowledge of Amazon culture comes across with an insider's familiarity but an outsider's objectivity. The narrative goes deep in places, and yet it bounces along, carried by personal quotes and anecdotes. It's darn interesting. The story is about Bezos the person and Amazon the business. It's rife with Bezo's uncanny vision, with allusions to how he got that way. Problems at Amazon come through too -- it's not all glory. Some problems are strategic in terms of product buying and selling, finances, and technical execution; and other problems concern Amazon's disquieting treatment of employees, suppliers, and smaller rivals in markets where Amazon wields major power. The story frequently gets personal looking at Jeff Bezos, but mercifully, the author stops just short of sensationalism or blind hero-worship or a masked publicity stunt for Amazon. The Everything Book is none of those things. Brad Stone's narrative admires Amazon's innovation and behemoth power build-up. He spends a lot of time on the first few years of the world wide web's emergence as a popular place to play, communicate, and shop. The narrative pauses briefly along the way at iconic cultural artifacts like Netscape's IPO in 1995. The book revivifies my days dialing up on my PC modem and using Netscape to browse Amazon and many other websites. Someday, that memory will be the stuff of a museum-goer's revelry or curiosity. The book strikes up that nostalgia right now, and that adds to the fun in the early chapters. The Amazon story launches in the mid-1990s when it was a family affair run by Bezos the now ex-financier and his wife, MacKenzie, out of a garage in Bellevue, Washington. Bezos "wanted to build he next Sears,'a lasting company that was a major force in retail." (p. 75). Would anyone now snicker at that? This is no ordinary garage hobby -- never was. We get a feel for the ground-level entrepreneurship too, where Bezos figured out how to elbow into a bookselling marketplace that was highly institutionalized, with relatively low profit margins. Ground-level entrepreneurship turns into "Jeff against the world," a cultural theme at Amazon, one executive reported years later. (p. 116) In an early example, Bezos risked industry resistance when he insisted on publishing customer reviews, whether favorable or unfavorable. Stone writes, "One important element in the early vision was that customers could leave written evaluations of any product, a more egalitarian and credible version of the old Montgomery Ward catalog reviews of its own suppliers..." (p. 24-25) "Naturally, some of the reviews were negative. In speeches, Bezos later recalled getting an angry letter from an executive at a book publisher implying that Bezos didn't understand that his business was to sell books, not trash them. 'We saw it very differently,' Bezos said. 'When I read that letter, I thought, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions." (p. 38) Stone displays the Amazon culture as bursting with creative tension and customer obsession that produces. Sometimes Amazon also missed, just narrowly, financial overreach and spinout. Do you remember the news stories in the late 90s about Amazon having not turned a profit after 16 quarters or something like that, despite a high volume of activity? And all the talk about Bezos insisting on playing a long game, buying and holding "waterfront property" on the internet, so that somebody else wouldn't get there first, while Amazon's business developed? This book shows all the expansionary fervor of those years, including a trove of corporate acquisitions and investments like Pets.com and Drugstore.com. Crucially, there came a turning point in 1999: "Kelyn Brannon, Amazon's chief accounting officer at the time, says that she and Joy Covey pulled Bezos into a meeting to show him a form of financial analysis called common-sizing the income statement; it expressed each part of the balance sheet as a percentage of value to sales. The calculations showed that at its current rate, Amazon wouldn't become profitable for decades. 'It was an aha moment,' Brannon says. Bezos agreed to lift his foot from the accelerator and begin to move the company toward profitability." (p. 91) Amazon turned in its first profitable quarter in late 2001, seven years after its founding. While the accountants and Jeff fretted at the top over the financial pace, the reader of Stone's book gets a feel for the factory floor too -- an exciting whoosh of making history, and also, grueling work weeks: "The young CEO liked to recite, 'You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can't choose two out of three." (p. 46) Twice in the initial chapters, we hear about "Save Santa" campaigns involving the abandonment of what was left of personal and family life, in order to compensate for explosive holiday sales volume and staff under-capacity. So if you ever wondered how your order "click" got your goods shipped so quickly in the holiday crush: "The rapid growth once again required the company to initiate the Save Santa operation. Employees said good-bye to their families and headed off on two-week shifts to staff the customer-service phone lines or work in distribution centers across the country. Frugal to the bone, Amazon packed them two to a hotel room. To some, it was the greatest experience they had ever had at the company. Others hated it and complained vociferously." (p. 94-95) If that sounds hard on employees, the Everything Store says yes, it is. "At ten years old, Amazon could be a deeply unhappy place to work. The stock price was flat, there were strict limits on annual raises, and the pace was unrelenting. Employees felt underpaid and overworked. When the new development centers opened in Palo Alto and elsewhere, the joke inside Amazon was that it was a necessary move because everyone in Seattle was aware of how abjectly miserable employees at the company were." (p. 201) Another through-line is that, like the better-known Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Bezos had a passion for the customer experience and would tolerate nothing less from his subordinate managers: "With Christmas sales ramping up and hold times on Amazon phone lines once again growing longer, Bezos began the meeting by asking Price what the customer wait times were. Price then violated a cardinal rule at Amazon: he assured Bezos that they were well under a minute but without offering much in the way of proof. "Really?' Bezos said. 'Let's see.' On the speakerphone in the middle of the conference table, he called Amazon's 800 number. Incongruously cheerful hold music filled the room. Bezos took his watch off and made a deliberate show of tracking the time. A brutal minute passed, then two. Other execs fidgeted uncomfortably while Price furtively picked up his cell phone and quietly tried to summon his subordinates. Bezos's face grew red; the vein in his forehead, a hurricane warning system, popped out and introduced itself to the room. Around four and a half minutes passed, but according to multiple people at the meeting who related the story, the wait seemed interminable. "Eventually a cheerful voice blurted out, 'Hello, Amazon.com!' Bezos said, "I'm just calling to check," and slammed down the phone. Then he tore into Price, accusing him of incompetence and lying. "Price was gone about ten months later. "(p. 113) Stone's book shows that I have been sheltered from all that in my place as a happy customer. I'll be more sympathetic next time Amazon delivers their customarily fine service. While I find it disconcerting to hear grueling tales of woe inside Amazon's walls, the fact remains that as a customer, I have been an Amazon enthusiast. That makes this book all the more interesting for me. I have never worked at Amazon, nor invested there, nor do I know anyone who did. But I have appreciated Amazon for more than a decade. When Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal, I fretted; but when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, I thought hmmm, this could get interesting. That's how I felt as the book unfolded, and I was not disappointed. Further, the Audible.com version is perfectly performed. I recommended it to a business associate already on day one, when I was only a few chapters in. Speaking of day one, I quite enjoyed Stone's recitation on the door to Jeff Bezos's office: "There is so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way. Jeff Bezos" (p. 9)

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Good book - worth purchasing!
*by R***E on October 15, 2013*

So, I just finished reading "The Everything Store" by Brad Stone. I am not a fan of elaborate and long-winded reviews about whether a book is worth reading or not. I'll make it easy for you - this one is. It's a good read as a business book, as a tech book, and it is helpful if you're interested in Seattle history. I'll go into more detail below if you're reading what the "self absorbed internet troll" Robby Delaware thinks.* If you're like most people who peruse reviews, I hope this helps. I was contemplating writing a too-cool-for-school review that mentioned the time I thought I ran into Bezos in Ballard on the sidewalk in back of the BofA building. But I didn't. ... Now for some of my self absorbed ramblings. This isn't what I liked about the book, more about what I found surprising. The author himself acknowledges that this is one of the first complete histories of the company, and I would wager that there will be an afterword to future releases of this book. I've been looking forward to the release this book for some time. I downloaded it as soon as it was released for Kindle. I began reading this book in a sort of unusual way. I began reading it by kind of keeping a mental checklist in my own mind. I was curious if the author, who has covered Amazon for a long time, would omit certain things. The book is clearly biased towards Amazon and Bezos - which isn't surprising and doesn't diminish the appeal of the book. Still, I couldn't help but think that portions of the book were clearly written by someone who wasn't familiar with Seattle culture and by someone who didn't quite view events the same way that many other people did. I took notes while reading the book, and here's a list of things that I found surprising about the book while I was reading it: I was very surprised that a number of relatively small controversies since 2008 didn't make it into this book. I believe that the absence of these stories is unfortunate, and won't help those seeking a full understanding of the company. Amazon, since the rise of social media, has become the source of a number of controversies that I like to call "Twitter worthy." Many of you may recall stories like Amazon Japan selling whale meat, or a pedophile self-publishing an e-book how-to guide, or the remote removal of Orwell books from Kindle readers for DRM reasons, or the deranking of Gay and Lesbian literature. While these stories in an of themselves aren't the kind of stories that are likely to make it on the front page of a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal, these stories will be remembered. One of the only times I ever saw a DRM issue discussed on television was a segment I watched on a cable news show in 2009 about the kid in Minnesota whose Orwell books (and notes) were remotely removed. Why are these stories important, and why do they matter for Amazon? It's simple, because Amazon has grown so large and so global, obscure controversies become easier to understand and even easier to pin on a single retailer. Plus, you've got to feed the twitter beast. Remember the gay/lesbian deranking scandal in 2009? Didn't a hacker do it? Didn't the hacker claim that pulling the urls of gay/lesbian themed books was very easy, and that used an automated script to flag each one as adult? Didn't the hacker claim that he did it for very specific political reasons, and that if you're going to do something like that for political reasons - it's only natural to target Amazon? You see what I'm getting at. There's always been little stories like this - but in an age of twitter and Drudge the smallest story about a holocaust themed board game that one, solitary, third party seller offered can blow up in a spectacular manner. That was the controversies - I was also a little dismayed by how little space was given to Amazon's overall role in the life of Seattle, and I was shocked by how little of a role the Nisqually earthquake played in the narrative of the story. Why is the Nisqually earthquake important? Well, first off, the book claims the earthquake measure 6.9 on the richter scale. I don't believe that's correct - it measured 6.8. Why quibble over something so minor? I believe, strongly, that when future writers look back at the history of Seattle and Amazon's role in city life, the Ash Wednesday earthquake will play a much larger role than anyone who didn't experience it can imagine. That earthquake, which wasn't even that large, trashed a lot of Seattle's commercial real estate. It wasn't just Amazon's PacMed building - there are still boarded up buildings in the city of Seattle today. It is my belief that Paul Allen's South Lake Union project (which had been resounding defeated by Seattle voters during the "commons" debate years earlier) would not have proceeded if it had not been for that earthquake. Which company has dived head first into the transformation of South Lake Union? You guessed it, Amazon. I used to hanging out in the late 90s in South Lake Union. You know who occupied South Lake Union in the late 90s? Dudes who lived in vans, that's who. I went back to that same exact area in 2011 and the place was virtually unrecognizable. This isn't Apple building a UFO shaped HQ in a California suburb that already resembles a golf course combined with the set of "Logan's Run." The project to transform South Lake Union is like Robert Moses on ten lattes - a massive transformation of an urban environment - with Amazon at the center. I could go on about this. About how the book neglected to mention the 1999 WTO conference, when newspaper columnists berated that the "black clad" protestors were "raging against the dot-coms in their own backyard as much as they were against global trade." Or I could mention the recent Seattle Times series from the Blethen family that snootily noted that Bezos is the least engaged civic leader in a city that hosts the majority of America's richest people. But, I won't. You get the picture. I don't think the book covered Amazon's tangled relationship with the city that well. Two other small points - and then I'll stop yakking. The book mentioned Pelago (where I spent seven months as a contract tester) as having been engaged in a mobile search project. I don't think that description is entirely correct. Yes, search was important, and yes, i'd heard that somehow people had or hadn't been asked by Google to come aboard. Still, I remember being told (even as a lowly contract tester) several times - "you might have heard this start-up is about location, email notifications, and tying coupons and deals together. It's not about that. You're not getting it." What's the old saying that was used during the Clinton impeachment trial? "When they say it's not about the sex, it's about the sex!" Pelago might had a lot of energy focused on mobile search - but it was basically an attempt to be a location-based Groupon before Groupon. It's infrastructure fit so well with what Groupon wanted to do that it (surprise!) folded into Groupon. Why did the book make so little mention of the relationship between Groupon and Amazon? Seattle tech blogs like GeekWire are regularly filled with stories of Groupon poaching Amazon executives. Both the rise of Groupon and their quirky and endearing first CEO wouldn't have been possible without Amazon and the existence of Bezos. Wall Street wouldn't have allowed it. One final point before I get off my soapbox. The very end of the book mentions a woman who worked for seven months at Amazon trying to get the company to embrace social media more broadly. Talk about understatement of the year. I've been continually amazed at the haphazard and lazy approach of both Amazon and Apple to social shopping. If Bezos isn't a big fan of music (grabbing assorted cds off a shelf without even looking to see what they are) I'm going to guess he doesn't use or see much need in using social media for shopping - which is a shame, since the Kindle is such a perfect platform for doing this. The @Author program was a great idea - but with zero follow up. The twitter feed hasn't been updated since February. The purchase of Goodreads looks like buying your way out of the problem. Anyways, I could write more. Amazon's a fascinating company, that I have a variety of opinions about. Purchase this book. You won't regret it. *You have to refer to yourself in the third person to be truly self absorbed.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Behold the Apex Predator
*by M***R on November 12, 2013*

"The Everything Store" was such an engaging and fascinating read, I inhaled it in less than 36 hours. (For the sake of my sleep and work schedule, I'm glad books like this don't come along too often.) As I write this review, Amazon just announced a partnership with the US Postal Service to start delivering on Sundays for Prime members in key cities. This backs up the best description I have heard of Amazon and its founder -- which, amusingly, comes from the blog of ex-Amazon employee Eugene Wei, someone who was not interviewed in this book. "Amazon has boundless ambition," Wei writes. "It wants to eat global retail... there are very few people in technology and business who are what I'd call apex predators. Jeff [Bezos] is one of them, the most patient and intelligent one I've met in my life. An apex predator doesn't wake up one day and decide it is done hunting." Stock valuation aside -- you either believe or you don't, and as of this writing Bezos is clearly having a messianic moment -- "The Everything Store" is an excellent chronicle of Amazon's rise. In the book -- and I don't mean this as a criticism -- Bezos comes off as the lead character in an Ayn Rand novel. A real world John Galt or Hank Rearden, with an e-commerce twist. The immigrant step-father who taught him the value of hard work... the maternal grandfather who instilled a deep do-it-yourself attitude... the flashes of extraordinary competitiveness from an early age... the burning desire to conquer space... it all coalesces into a sense of destiny (though, of course, a good portion of this could be narrative hindsight). Steve Jobs was the last great business figure, the hero entrepreneur of our time. I think that, reputationally, Bezos will ultimately surpass Jobs -- leave him in the dust, really -- because while, what Bezos is doing is unsexy, the fundamental nature of "hard problems" that Amazon approaches and solves (on its way to eating global retail) is adding to the free market knowledge base at a tremendous evolutionary rate. One of the most intriguing and powerful things about Amazon, in my opinion, is the sheer logistical prowess of what they do behind the scenes. The coordination of supply chains, manpower, algorithmic decision making, and countless other unseen problems they have had to solve on the way to delivering "everything" in a two-day shipping window is off-the-charts impressive. To a certain degree Apple accomplished a similar behind-the-scenes feat, in that Apple's masterful ability to implement and coordinate global supply chains made it the most profitable company in the world for a time. But Apple's breathtaking profit margins always had a slightly ephemeral feel to them. You knew that someone (like Samsung or Google's Android) would eventually come along and take a bite of the Apple so to speak... whereas with Bezos' strategy, staking out the hard, grinding, low-nutrient territory of thin margins, the next competitor is going to have to get bloody in the toughest octagon of all (logistics and scale). As Bezos likes to say, "Your margin is my opportunity," which should scare the hell out of any large retailer, perhaps save Wal-Mart (and maybe even Wal-Mart too). Those who doubt Amazon's business model (myself among them in the past) have been prone to use the "switch flip" criticism, e.g. bullish investors assume Amazon will one day be able to "flip a switch" and become profitable. But I agree with Eugene Wei that this is an overly simplistic characterization of a more subtle process. In reality, Amazon is less like a company with one switch to flip and more like one with tens of thousands of individual switches, each of which can be incrementally adjusted to swing from loss to profit when the time is right. This seems far less fantastical when you picture thousands upon thousands of instances where, say, a 2% margin mark-up creates profit where previously there was break-even, and/or a simple slowdown in the prodigious rate of ongoing capital expenditure spending lets more cash flow spill over into the profit column. As for the prodigious capital expenditures, Amazon's most recent quarterly revenue figure, as of this writing, was roughly $17 billion. Bezos no doubt foresees the day when that quarterly number will hit $100 billion. On the way there, it only makes sense for him to exploit every inch of leeway he can get from Wall Street -- in terms of taking all the money and opportunity he can for long-term investment -- with the goal of scaling up the infrastructure to serve and support an order-of-magnitude larger sales base. If investors get loopy with their valuation assessments in the meantime, so be it. The vision is the thing for Bezos... just as it has always been. But getting back to "The Everything Store," my favorite thing about this book was the brutally honest nature of the flaws and the messiness of Amazon's evolution (and the evolution of Bezos himself) in the first 5-10 years or so of the company's existence. Through an excellent weave of facts, narrative anecdotes and storytelling, you get a clear picture of how Amazon surged out of the gate in the late 1990s, and then almost choked to death on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bad acquisitions it made with "bubble money." Many dumb mistakes were made, some deservedly fatal... but Amazon survived them all, and managed to learn from them too. The evolution of Bezos as a CEO is fully apparent as well. While those who ponder Bezos today are likely to assume he stepped on the world's stage as a wise genius fully formed, in actuality he picked up many of his strong core beliefs along the course of Amazon's existence, learning through intense study of rivals and mentors from afar, like D.E. Shaw (early on) and Sam Walton and Jim Sinegal of Costco. The book is really a gift for entrepeneurs and business builders of the new generation -- like myself, ahem cough cough -- in the manner it lays bare the luck, the guts, and the serious mistakes that are inevitably made on the way to forming a world-class enterprise. The other thing that really came through is the sheer ruthlessness of Bezos. (No doubt this is what got Mackenzie Bezos riled up -- what spouse wants to see their husband portrayed as a tyrant?) But as the book points out, there is a reason why so many of the great builders in tech -- Gates, Ellison, Jobs and so on -- all had that same ruthless character to them. Building and scaling a world-dominating business is hard. As in really, really hard. When you are trying do something on that kind of scale, with that level of competitiveness, you are not just fighting against cut-throat competitors. You are also fighting against entropy and mediocrity, that pull of ordinary results, ordinary outcome (as opposed to extraordinary) that holds back every ambitious endeavor in the same manner the NASA shuttle is held back by gravity. It takes something special to get off the launching pad, let alone into orbit. The fact that Bezos can be extremely ruthless, even cold-blooded, in pursuit of his vision, will not gain extra points with much of his audience. (No doubt a reason Amazon itself wants to tone that side down.) But investors should be glad for this trait, and it's a trait that benefits capitalism on the whole too. When a strong player legitimately uses skill and efficiency to best a weaker player in the marketplace, costs are lowered as such that customers benefit, and other businesses can learn from the strong player's pioneering example. The final chapters of the book showed Amazon at its most ruthless by far. I had no idea the level of wargame strategy that had occurred in the purchase of Zappos. The Quidsi (diapers.com) acquisition was simultaneously even more brilliant and brutal. You do not, not, not want to be in head-to-head competition with Amazon. It is here where I stop and whisper a small prayer of thanks to the free market gods that my own career path does not involve selling commodity-type retail products. I had reason to examine my own motives as to why I enjoyed this book so much. I am a trader, not a retailer. While I have plans to lead and scale a business to large (perhaps even very large) size, it has nothing to do with traditional retail really. So why was this book so fascinating? Perhaps for the sheer cultural value of what Bezos represents and what he has accomplished. Here is a guy who started out smart, talented and exceptionally bold, and had the chutzpah to act on a wildly ambitious vision and see it through every step of the way. Learning and stumbling as he went, sometimes screwing up royally, but always pulling in the errors and coming back from the brink... having laid the architecture more than a dozen years ago to sustain a vision ten times bigger (or maybe even 100 times). The broader inspirational lesson from the Amazon story, I think, is the reaffirmation of what's possible when motivated dreamers decide to work harder, work smarter, and break traditional molds all at the same time. You really can execute on a compelling vision. You really can get a team together and, with the help of that team, accomplish a hundred or a thousand times more than you ever could running solo. You really can practice patience and boldness -- no coincidence "bold" is one of Bezos' favorite words -- and in so doing apply an Art-of-War like strategic nous to flanking and beating your rivals. Big and exciting things can be done in this world.

## Frequently Bought Together

- The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
- Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
- Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson

---

## Why Shop on Desertcart?

- 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016
- 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories
- 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price
- 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members)
- 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection
- ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews

**Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.pt/products/211810-the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon](https://www.desertcart.pt/products/211810-the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon)

---

*Product available on Desertcart Portugal*
*Store origin: PT*
*Last updated: 2026-10-21*