25 Amazon Facts That Might Just Surprise You

1. Gift cards from Big Companies expire because of the accounting problem. Companies like Amazon, use accrual accounting. They enter the value of the Gift cards that are sold as Liabilities, specifically "Prepaid-Sales" Liability which affects their Revenue. Hence they have "Service Charge". -u/flamefibers

2. Amazon physically ships 100 petabytes of data at a time via shipping containers on semi-trucks to AWS datacenters for companies migrating to the cloud. -u/2Insaiyan

3. Ring was on Shark Tank and walked away without a deal. Ring later sold to Amazon for $1 billion. -u/HBombBrohan

4. Amazon’s first CFO was later killed in an accident with a van delivering Amazon packages. -u/tropicaleskimo2

5. 1.9 million Americans work for either Walmart or Amazon. -u/iajzz

6. Walter Schramm bought AMZN stock in 90's and pledged not to look at his stock account for 20 years. After 20 years logged on and $100,000 worth of Amazon stock was gone. Taken by the state government as unclaimed property because his account was deemed inactive. -u/btb331

7. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and country singer George Strait are cousins. -u/Nesomo9

8. Amazon pays music artists $0.00402 per stream, so to earn $1830.85 in a month it would require 366,169 streams. -u/LettuceWithBeetroot

9. There is a type of online scam called Brushing wherein you get orders from Amazon you never placed. The seller places a gift in your name and address, ships a cheap item in it's place but since, order is verified as delivered, they can post "positive" reviews for the original order. -u/prasiptasp

10. Amazon Web Service's ToS includes a clause that, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, the Lumberyard program's acceptable use clause no longer applies. -u/Fanceepance

11. In 2014, people created fake 90$ PS4 listings on Amazon and showed them to Walmart, thus getting a 90$ PS4 because of their price matching. -u/nachog2003

12. In 1994 Guns n Roses Bassist Duff McKagan bought $100,000 in stock in Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks. -u/DriveGenie

13. In 2009, Amazon sold as many Michael Jackson albums in the 24 hours after his death than in the previous 11 years. -u/Die_Nameless_Bitch

14. Jeff Bezos’ team tried to keep him and his estranged wife, Mackenzie, together with a $12,500-a-week intensive therapy retreat in Maui, Hawaii. Friends wanted the Amazon boss to agree to a 30-day physical separation from Sanchez, and encouraged Jeff and MacKenzie to undergo couples therapy. -u/-AMARYANA-

15. Jeff Bezos chose books as the thing to first sell on Amazon because it was the product that had the most individual items. -u/badRLplayer

16. The first book ever to be sold on Amazon was "Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies." -u/MarkyChoco

17. Amazon has a web service called Snowmobile that transfers a company's data in a mobile data center(vehicle filled with hard drives) with armed guards. -u/SeeIToldYouSo69420

18. Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa, was given her name for two reasons. The hard consonant "X" allows her to recognize her name easier, and the name "Alexa" is also reminiscent of the Library of Alexandria; as the library was the "keeper of all knowledge." -u/ImNoPCGamer

19. One of Amazon's earliest employees brought his Corgi, Rufus, to work each day. He became such a fixture that the company named a building after him and allows employees to bring their dogs to work. Amazon has over 2,000 four-legged "employees", averaging nearly 600 per day. -u/colterpierce

20. At an Amazon.com warehouse in Pennsylvania, workers were required to work -- in some cases walking 15 miles a day -- in 100+ degree heat. When the news broke, Amazon's initial response was to keep an ambulance outside the warehouse. -deleted user

21. Amazon owns the patent for purchasing things with a single mouse click. -u/notlogic

22. In 2013, J.K. Rowling secretly released a book under a different name in order to release a book "without hype and expectation." When she was revealed to be the author, the book surged from 4,709th on Amazon to the 1st best-selling novel. -u/moonsprite

23. Amazon warehouses use a chaotic storage system where products are not stored by what they are, but rather by where in the warehouse they can best fit. -u/hermsfarm

24. In 2009, Amazon sold diapers at a 100m loss to scare Diapers.com into selling them their business or face being ran into the ground. -u/dougaru

25. Amazon is the 2nd largest private employer in the US. -u/drecklia