What Jeff Bezos Learned From His Employee and How It Changed Amazon

‘Jeff, we should get packing tables.’”

According to Jeff Bezos, American internet entrepreneur, industrialist, media proprietor, and investor, this line changed his life and business forever.

In 1994, the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos seemed fed up with the corporate world and slowly quit his job using a hedge fund in New York. This saw him also moving to the Seattle suburbs.

From this significant and bold me, he ended renting a small garage. Unknown to many, these humble beginnings would be the original headquarters of the biggest e-commerce site: Amazin.

After one year, Amazon’s site was introduced,

Within 30 days, the company had sold books to people across 50 states in the United States of America.

In a Bush Center Forum on Leadership back in April 2018, he recalled that “in those days [in 1995], when I started the company back in that time, we were still a pretty small company by most standards, but we were growing fast, and it was very exciting.”

“We were so inefficient with our operations and logistics in those early days when there were just 10 of us,” he also added.

The early problems and inefficiencies they experienced were their method of packing orders.

In 30 day, felt that hell, Bezos and his employees would pack orders on their hands and knees on cement floors. This was the time when one of his ten employees suggested a simple thought which could “doubled” their productivity.

“I didn’t have packing tables. I said to one of the software engineers who was packing alongside me, ‘You know what we should do? We should get knee pads.’ And he looked at me like I was the dumbest guy he had ever seen in his life, and he said ‘Jeff, we should get packing tables.’”

Bezos, the world’s first $200 Billion men, said obtaining packing tables was “the most brilliant idea” he had ever caught.

The next day, he ran to buy the “packing tables”, and voila, the start of increase on productivity doubled.

Come 1997, Amazon the company’s employee base catapulted to 614,

Bezos admitted that in the course of the company’s business, he had open ears to his employees, and he acknowledged that some of these ideas are “crazy”.

Another “aha” is when they are brainstorming for a loyalty program. This is before the creation of Amazon Prime.

“A kind of a junior software engineer came up with this idea, not as a loyalty program, but this idea that we could offer people kind of an all-you-can-eat buffet of fast, free shipping,” he recalled.

But he also added that “The finance team went and modeled that idea, and the results were horrifying that we would offer unlimited shipping,” he said. “Shipping is expensive.”

Despite a roller coaster of price changes, supplies and demands and a lot of economic circuses, it went well in the end.

Lastly, he mentions that “all kinds of customers were coming, and they appreciated that service.”

Apart from that, according to Bezos, were the ones that saw the birth of Amazon Prime.