{"id":9775,"date":"2019-05-04T18:49:10","date_gmt":"2019-05-05T01:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=9775"},"modified":"2019-05-05T18:53:36","modified_gmt":"2019-05-06T01:53:36","slug":"the-birth-of-prime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2019\/05\/04\/the-birth-of-prime\/","title":{"rendered":"The Birth Of Prime"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/recode\/2019\/5\/3\/18511544\/amazon-prime-oral-history-jeff-bezos-one-day-shipping\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"from Vox (opens in a new tab)\">from Vox<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The making of Amazon Prime, the internet\u2019s most successful and devastating membership program<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">An oral history of the subscription service that changed online shopping forever.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>By\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/authors\/jason-del-rey\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\">Jason Del Rey<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/thumbor\/Bi7jrzPggSJ9_urJBvRztPTA9x0=\/0x0:4221x4125\/1200x0\/filters:focal(0x0:4221x4125):no_upscale()\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/uploads\/chorus_asset\/file\/16207774\/GettyImages_50335080.jpg\" alt=\"Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos pushing a shopping cart full of books back in 1998.\"\/><figcaption>Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos in Seattle, Washington in September 1998.\u00a0Rex Rystedt\/The LIFE Images Collection\/Getty Images<br><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s easy to forget now, but Amazon wasn\u2019t always the king of online shopping. In the fall of 2004, Jeff Bezos\u2019s company was still mostly selling just books and DVDs.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That same year, Amazon was under siege from multiple sides. Some of its biggest competitors were brick-and-mortar chains like Best Buy, which was still in expansion mode at the time, with sales growing 17 percent annually. Toys \u2018R\u2019 Us sued Amazon in a high-profile battle, alleging it had violated an agreement the two companies had for the toy store chain to be an exclusive seller on Amazon.com.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And during the holiday season, Amazon\u2019s website suffered repeated outages, drawing the wrath of customers and the press alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Amazon was worth $18 billion at the time. Its online rival eBay, on the other hand, was an internet darling worth nearly $33 billion. If you were an outsider to both companies and you had to pick one as the future Everything Store, it might have been hard to imagine Amazon as the victor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But 15 years later, Amazon is worth more than $900 billion, compared to just $33 billion for its old foe eBay, which spun off its (more valuable) payment division, PayPal. And the Amazon Prime membership program is perhaps the biggest reason why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/recode\/2019\/5\/3\/18511544\/amazon-prime-oral-history-jeff-bezos-one-day-shipping\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"click to continue reading at Vox (opens in a new tab)\">click to continue reading at Vox<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from Vox The making of Amazon Prime, the internet\u2019s most successful and devastating membership program An oral history of the subscription service that changed online shopping forever. By\u00a0Jason Del Rey It\u2019s easy to forget now, but Amazon wasn\u2019t always the king of online shopping. In the fall of 2004, Jeff Bezos\u2019s company was still mostly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}