...it cheap

When Jack Cohen set up his barrow stall to sell surplus groceries in the East End of London in 1919, he might not have believed that a new unit of measurement would be coined ninety years later.  The ‘Tesco’ is equivalent to £40billion.  Or to put it another way, Tescos is now worth  1/24th of the UK’s GDP.  Jack Cohen’s business motto was “pile it high and sell it cheap”, although this was quickly replaced with the saying “You Can’t Do Business Sitting On Your Arse”. He distributed items bearing the acronym “YCDBSOYA” to his sales force.  Add the square footage of their UK stores together and Tescos is larger than the State of Monaco.

An interesting report from the BBC on the sheer scale of Tescos.  Some good local news.  Despite receiving planning permission they decided not to proceed with a store (on stilts) in Glastonbury, where many small local retailers thrive. We have an excellent butcher, baker, delicatessen, a lively weekly market and a whole-food store that has taken over the old Woolworths store.  Exactly the sort of retail environment that Jack Cohen would have been familiar with in 1919. Long may it continue.

Engraved on the doors of the Amazon warehouse entrance is Jeff Bezos’s motivational phrase to all his employees ‘Work hard, have fun, make history‘.  Just below this notice (and written in invisible ink), is the following addendum  ‘and thanks for making me a multi-billionaire in the process‘. The growth of Amazon has been truly phenomenal.  From a two-bedroom house in Seattle in 1994, with extension leads running into the garage to power the servers, to a global business now serving 45 million customers.

When I’ve run e-commerce seminars, one of the questions I regularly ask delegates is ‘What do you think is the secret of Amazon’s success?’  Almost everyone says – ‘ the low prices’ or ‘the range of stock they carry’.  I then bring up the quote from Jeff Bezos himself, which underpins the Amazon philosophy – ‘Amazon.com is obsessively focussed on great customer service‘. It is a sentence that should be enshrined in the heart of every e-commerce entrepreneur.

It is hard to believe that when Amazon started receiving its first online orders, the programmers coded a small electronic beep to sound in the office every time an order arrived.  Every beep was greeted with a loud cheer in the Amazon office. It wasn’t long before they had to switch it off. Permanently.