Momentous news emerged from deep within the Amazon leviathan last week. No, I’m not talking about the stock hitting $1,000 a share — of which more shortly. I’m talking about a patent it was granted for new shipping labels packed with parachutes, so that drones can airdrop parcels and have them land softly. Amazon could literally rain down packages upon us.
The patent is the latest piece of a complex puzzle founder Jeff Bezos has set out to solve: how can you make as many humans as possible redundant? If his success so far is any indication, it won’t be long before Amazon hits $2,000 a share — and destroys entire industries in the process.
Bezos is now within a whisker of dethroning Bill Gates as the world’s richest man. As of Friday he was worth $86bn, compared with Gates at $89bn. Amazon’s value has soared to $480bn, almost twice that of Wal-Mart, though the latter has nearly six times the profit. Investors are betting on the future.
Which brings us back to the robots. When Amazon first unveiled its delivery drones in 2013 to a prime time audience on 60 Minutes, America’s most venerated TV news magazine, many dismissed it as a cheap stunt. Charlie Rose, the interviewer, said: “I had no idea what its purpose was at first glance. They actually look like something out of a Philip K Dick novel.”
This was no stunt. Six months ago, Amazon conducted its first real-world drone delivery — of a Fire TV Stick and a bag of popcorn — in Cambridgeshire (Amazon has a deal with British authorities to test drone delivery; it remains illegal in America).
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This is the tip of the iceberg. The parachute labels would mean, potentially, that drones would not even have to land. Indeed, they may not touch the ground for weeks or months, thanks to Amazon’s patent for flying warehouses — giant airships that float at 45,000ft and serve as aerial bases for parcels and drones. And they have a patent to install charging platforms atop existing tall structures, such as street lights, so drones can recharge on long journeys.
The company is also experimenting with aquatic storage facilities, where parcels are weighted down in bodies of water until an order triggers a balloon that brings it to the surface.
Back on land, not far from its Seattle headquarters, it has just opened its first walk-in, walk-out grocery store. Simply check in with your smartphone on the way in, pick up what you need, which is detected by a computer, and walk out. No need to pay — your Amazon account is charged automatically.
Perhaps none of these wild ideas will truly take off. But elements certainly will, and some already are. The implications are clear — there are, for example, 1.3m delivery drivers in America, and 3.4m cashiers.
At the heart of all this is Bezos’s excessive paranoia that not only allows, but encourages, outlandish experimentation. It’s an ethos he sums up as “Day 1”.
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In his latest shareholder letter, he explained: “Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all that can happen. Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.”
Being that paranoid — looking at seemingly every convention or traditional approach and deciding it is wrong — seems . . . exhausting. I certainly don’t have that type of energy. I just wish I’d recognised it in Bezos 20 years ago, when it floated; $5,000 invested then would be worth $3.3m today. I feel so “Day 2”.