Page 6 -

The digital surge began with online “pantry-load- 2nd paragraph
ing” as consumers bulk-ordered toilet rolls and pasta.
Amazon’s first-quarter sales rose by 26% year on year.
When stimulus cheques arrived in mid-April Americans
let rip on a broader range of goods. Two rivals, eBay and
Costco, say online activity accelerated in May. There has
been a scramble to meet demand, with Mr Bezos doing
daily inventory checks once again. Amazon has hired
175,000 staff, equipped its people with 34m gloves, and
leased 12 new cargo aircraft, bringing its fleet to 82. Un-
dergirding the e-commerce surge is an infrastructure of
cloud computing and payments systems. Amazon owns
a chunk of that, too, through AWS, its cloud arm, which
saw first-quarter sales rise by 33%.
One question is whether the digital surge will 3rd paragraph
subside. Shops are reopening, even if customers have
to pay at tills shielded by Perspex. Yet the signs are that
some of the boom will last, because it has involved not
just the same people doing more of the same. A new
cohort has taken to shopping online. In America “sil-
ver” customers in their 60s have set up digital-payment
accounts. Many physical retailers have suffered fatal
damage. Dozens have defaulted or are on the brink, in-
cluding J Crew and Neiman Marcus. In the past year the
shares of warehousing firms, which thrive on e-com-
merce, have outperformed those of shopping-mall land-
lords by 48 percentage points.
All this might appear to fit the script Mr Bezos 4th paragraph
has written over the years in his letters to shareholders,
which are now pored over by investors as meticulously
as those of Mr Buffett. He argues that Amazon is in a
perpetual virtuous circle in which it spends money to

18