Amazon started out as a small book shipping company in Jeff Bezos’s apartment. Within five years, it had shipped over 20 million books worldwide. After another 5 years, it had its own cloud computing service. Then a movie and TV show studio and streaming service. Amazon is poised to take over the world. Now, the corporation is on track to surpass even Apple, the largest publicly listed company in the world.
The company’s phenomenal rise illustrates America’s demand for convenience. It also speaks to the growth of the Triangle, placing in the top-20 potential locations on the eastern seaboard, according to Amazon executives. One group claimed that hosting Amazon’s HQ would bring 17 billion dollars in development to the surrounding area. Others claim that the already traffic ridden of the Triangle need no more of it.
Efficiency is the name of the game, where anything in the world can be in hand within two days. Before Amazon, consumers actually had to go physically shop for things and take what they could get. Now it sells over 3 billion products worldwide. Bezos has created a company that changes the way our society works. What would our world look like without Amazon? Would in-store shopping still be the biggest thing out there? Maybe Northgate and other shopping malls would still be booming with business.
What if Amazon had come to the Triangle? Would other companies start flooding in? I guess we’ll never know.
