Earlier this 12 months, Amazon reported $143.3 billion in income for the primary quarter of 2024. However 27 years in the past, the BBC puzzled when predictions that the web revolutionizing buying would come true, talking to native bakers, booksellers, and even Jeff Bezos to search out out.
The Cash Programme report, which initially aired in November of 1997, was not too long ago added to the BBC Archive YouTube Channel. In it, reporter Nils Blythe takes a simulated journey on the knowledge superhighway — full with splendidly dated ‘90s-era blue display screen results and graphics — and speaks to retailers who had various ranges of success with on-line commerce on the time.
These included a small bakery within the UK that was having fun with a number of hundreds of {dollars} in gross sales yearly promoting its baked items internationally, and the British grocery store chain Sainsbury’s that was having middling success promoting groceries utilizing the web, telephones, and even faxes.
Blythe additionally spoke with Jeff Bezos who had launched Amazon.com as a web-based e book retailer simply two years prior. Bezos bragged that Amazon’s catalog of over 2.5 million books was ten occasions greater than the biggest brick-and-mortar e book shops had been capable of inventory, and predicted that “over some giant variety of years… web e book promoting goes to turn out to be a really giant enterprise.” He was largely appropriate, 4 years earlier than Amazon turned a revenue for the primary time.
