Amazon started as an e-bookstore. Now it's everywhere with everything

This story is part of the Iconic Brands series, a USA TODAY network project showcasing the companies and brands that helped shape the nation's identity, economy and culture. The series celebrates American ingenuity with a deeply reported examination of how brands intersect with history, community and everyday life in celebration of the nation's 250th anniversary. Find more at https://usatoday.com/usa250/iconic-brands

A cardboard box lands on a doorstep somewhere in metro Phoenix.

Inside are a paperback, a phone charger and a bottle of store-brand ibuprofen. A contract driver dropped it off before sunrise. A fulfillment center in Tolleson packed it. On the other side of the nation, software in Northern Virginia processed the order, routed the payment and tracked the package from a local warehouse to its final destination.

The entire transaction took less than 24 hours, and the customer never spoke to anyone involved.

That is Amazon in 2026. Millions of boxes move through a state like Arizona every week, and for some, has become the backbone of a business or a household. For others, it represents three decades of competition that reshaped entire industries. For a growing number of workers, it is the center of a labor fight over who pays the real cost of next-day delivery.

But it started as a website that sold books.

Amazon's beginnings as a bookstore

On July 16, 1995, Amazon.com went live from a garage in Bellevue, Washington. Founder Jeff Bezos called it “Earth’s biggest bookstore,” and within months the company was shipping to all 50 states.

Two years later it went public at $18 a share. Barnes & Noble sued, arguing Amazon was not a real bookstore. The case settled, and Amazon kept the tagline.

The bookstore, it turned out, was just a starting point. After emailing 1,000 random customers to ask what else they would want Amazon to sell, the answers came back wildly varied. That was the moment, Amazon says, that Bezos saw the opportunity to build what he would later call "the everything store."

In the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, Cindy Dach was watching. Dach joined Changing Hands Bookstore in 1999. The store had already survived the arrival of big-box chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble, but she said Amazon felt different.

“It felt very predatory,” said Dach, now CEO and owner of Changing Hands. “They came on solely selling books cheaper than what we could sell them, and at that time they didn’t charge tax.” Dach said customers began showing up to book-signing events carrying books purchased online. Events had always been free, but they cost the store real money, and the model had to change.

“We immediately learned the purchase of a book from us gets you a seat,” Dach said. “That was met with terrible backlash.” Authors pushed back, too. One writer once called Dach on the way to an event, furious that fans were not being seated. Years later, she called again to apologize.

“But at the time,” Dach said, “Amazon was helping her become a national bestseller.” Every night, Dach said, she wondered what Amazon would announce next. Toys. Drugstore items. Zappos. Each expansion signaled that the bookstore was only the beginning.

Amazon morphs into the 'everything' store

After surviving the dot-com crash, Amazon expanded rapidly into electronics, toys and household goods. In 2005 it launched Amazon Prime, bundling two-day shipping into a yearly subscription and reshaping how Americans thought about waiting. But waiting a week began to feel unreasonable. Two days became normal, then one, then same day.

Today there are more than 200 million paid Prime members in 26 countries, according to Amazon. In 2025, Prime members saved an average of $550 on deliveries, more than four times the cost of an annual membership, the company reported.

James Frink felt that shift from both sides of a business ledger.

Frink owns Two Maids, a residential cleaning franchise that services the Phoenix area. When he opened in 2021, he connected his Prime account to his business and never disconnected it. Frink said Amazon now supplies roughly 80% of his operation, from mops and chemicals to specialty tools. He spends between $1,200 and $1,300 a month on the platform.

“It’s a tab I keep open all day long,” Frink said. “It’s almost like having email open. It’s that integral to our operation.”

He once relied on a wholesale supplier, but over time nearly everything moved online. “Prime is ingrained to the point where I can’t really cancel it,” he said. “It’s almost like putting gas in my car.”

Ken Chan made a similar decision from another corner of the Valley. Chan runs Mighty PC in Tempe, refurbishing donated computers for schools and nonprofits. He trains high school interns to understand basic computer repair, replacing batteries and cracked screens. Most of his parts arrive in Amazon boxes.

“Amazon just makes things so much quicker,” Chan said. “Overnight.” Amazon now supplies roughly 95% of his components. The laptops his interns repair end up in classrooms across the Valley.

“For me it’s not just owning a business and making money,” Chan said. “It’s making impact.”

Not everyone made that calculation.

Tonya Drew, a stay-at-home mother of 10 in Tempe, has spent years deliberately avoiding Amazon. She organizes her household around store ads and local discount chains because she prefers to see what she is buying. “I don’t like Amazon,” Drew said. “I want to look and see what I’m buying.”

When she wants something only Amazon carries, she routes around it by asking her daughter in Utah to place the order and ship it to her.

Amazon becomes the invisible everywhere company

By the time most Americans noticed how large Amazon had gotten, it was already woven into the electronic fabric of daily life.

Amazon Web Services launched in 2002 and expanded into enterprise cloud computing by 2006. It now holds roughly a third of the global cloud market. Millions of organizations rely on it to power their apps, services and devices, according to Amazon. An AWS outage does not just slow Amazon. It slows the internet.

Amazon also reached into living rooms.

Amazon Prime Video launched in 2006 as a digital rental service and grew into one of the largest streaming platforms in the world. Amazon poured billions into original programming. It signed deals with major Hollywood studios and in 2022 won the Academy Award for Best Picture for Manchester by the Sea.

As Americans canceled cable subscriptions and mounted larger screens on their walls, the company was on both sides of the transaction, selling the television and filling it with content. Going to the movies became something Americans did occasionally rather than habitually.

In 2013, Bezos made a separate personal purchase that signaled his expanding influence beyond commerce. He bought The Washington Post for $250 million, adding one of the nation’s most storied newspapers to a portfolio already reshaping how Americans shop, stream and store their data.

Alexa arrived in American kitchens in 2014. Amazon acquired Ring in February 2018 in a deal reported to be worth approximately $1 billion, putting its cameras on front porches across the country. Amazon acquired Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in August 2017. MGM came in March 2022 for $8.45 billion, adding a century-old Hollywood studio to Prime Video's catalog.

In Arizona, Amazon says its footprint includes 23 fulfillment and sortation centers, 14 delivery stations, 10 Whole Foods Market locations, one Amazon Pharmacy and one Prime Air drone delivery center in Tolleson.

The company says its Arizona presence began in 2007 and has since expanded into rural communities including Yuma, Sierra Vista and Prescott Valley. Nationally, Amazon directly employs more than 1 million people and says it has invested more than $35.8 billion in Arizona since 2010. All economic figures are estimated by Keystone Strategy, a consultancy hired by Amazon.

Then the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the U.S. in 2020.

Convenient becomes lifeline. When America needed Amazon to get through the pandemic

When storefronts shut down, Amazon expanded. The company hired hundreds of thousands of workers.

Toilet paper. Groceries. Medicine. Home office supplies. The cardboard box became a symbol of both safety and dependence, at a time basic necessities were missing from store shelves. The system held.

“While most of America hunkered down in their homes,” said Randy Korgan, director of the Teamsters Amazon Division, “these workers were out there making deliveries and making sure that what they needed still got to their doorstep.”

For Purvi Desai, that expansion created something she had not imagined when she launched her small business in Mesa in 2014.

Desai founded ZAAINA, a natural bath and beauty products company based in Mesa. She began selling on Amazon that year to reach a broader customer base. Her business has grown roughly 30% year over year. She now operates out of a 5,200-square-foot facility with an all-women team.

"Replicating this level of scale, convenience, and consumer confidence independently or through other platforms would be extremely difficult," Desai said.

None of that infrastructure runs without people. And how Amazon pays and treats those people has become one of the defining labor disputes of the decade.

The human cost of providing next-day convenience

Maricruz Delgadillo clocks in at 3 a.m. For customers, the box arrives quietly. For workers, it begins before dawn.

She works at Amazon delivery station EJT6 in Southern California’s Inland Empire, one of the densest logistics corridors in the country. She has worked on and off for Amazon since 2021.

“I’m awake while everybody’s asleep,” Delgadillo said. “Everybody that is moving those packages is very tired.”

Her base pay is $21 an hour. Weekend differential brings it to roughly $23 to $25. She splits a $2,000-a-month apartment with a roommate in Moreno Valley. “I would not at all be able to pay rent on my own,” she said.

The geography around her reflects the economy Amazon helped build. “Their whole area is pretty much just warehouses,” she said. “Almost every street you can see one.”

The Inland Empire traded its agricultural economy for logistics work over the past two decades. Amazon, Walmart, UPS and FedEx built massive distribution infrastructure there because land was cheap and freeway access to Los Angeles and the ports was direct.

Workers receive two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch. The break clock starts when management calls it, that includes the walk across the warehouse floor. “In reality it’s less than 10 minutes,” she said.

Amazon says frontline fulfillment and transportation employees earn an average base wage of more than $23 an hour in Arizona, with total compensation exceeding $30 an hour when benefits are included. At the end of last year, Amazon announced a $1 billion investment to raise pay and lower healthcare costs for U.S. fulfillment and transportation employees.

Starting in 2026, the company reduced entry-level healthcare premiums to $5 per week and copays to $5, cutting employee contributions by roughly 34%, according to a spokesperson.

Delgadillo began organizing with the Teamsters around March 2025

“They don’t really know how to handle when there’s a big group of us telling them we have an issue,” she said.

Korgan has spent more than 30 years with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, coming up through the transportation industry as a teenager. He leads the union's Amazon division now for a specific reason.

“If you’re making $23 an hour as a delivery driver,” Korgan said, “you cannot purchase a home in the Phoenix area.”

Korgan says that is not enough. “When I was in high school, there were jobs you could land without college that would buy a home and take care of a family,” he said. “I want to make sure a future generation can view it the same way.”

Over the past seven years Amazon says it has invested $16.7 billion in the Delivery Service Partner program across safety, rate cards, training and incentives. In 2025 alone it invested $1.9 billion in safety initiatives for DSP drivers, according to a spokesperson.

"Amazon requires them to have their uniform, Amazon branded van, Amazon branded equipment coming out of an Amazon facility, and then turns around and claims that none of those delivery drivers are their responsibility," Korgan said.

On March 9, more than 100 Amazon drivers at the DAX7 facility in Los Angeles marched on their managers demanding Teamsters recognition, according to a union press release. They joined workers already organized in five other Southern California cities. More than 10,000 Amazon workers nationwide are now part of the Teamsters organizing effort, the union says.

How does a giant continue to dominate?

Dach has watched Amazon’s public standing shift over 26 years. “In the beginning, consumers just saw cheaper prices,” she said. “Now there’s more awareness.”

She worries about what happens to communities when local retail disappears.“The taxes stay local,” she said. “You’re paying a local bookseller. Not somebody in another state.”

“Amazon can say, ‘You read this mystery book, you might like that mystery book,’” Dach said. “But that’s not genuine.” Amazon’s scale is undeniable. Its media kit materials list dozens of business lines: retail, cloud computing, streaming, pharmacy, advertising, hardware.

Amazon points to its community investments as evidence of a different kind of presence.

In 2024, the company says it gave more than $340 million to support more than 2,500 nonprofit organizations, delivered 12.5 million free meals to families in need and committed $2.4 billion to create or preserve affordable housing for more than 50,800 residents, according to Rachael Lighty, an Amazon spokesperson.

In Arizona specifically, Amazon says it has four new Whole Foods Market locations in development, in Scottsdale, Gilbert, Glendale and Surprise.

What's next for Amazon?

Drew will continue to refrain from using Amazon, but will keep sending her daughter in Utah the occasional request for an order.

Frink will keep that tab open and ordering supplies to keep his business running.

Chan will keep the boxes coming to his Tempe office, where high school students learn to build something from what arrives inside them.

Desai will keep shipping ZAAINA products from her Mesa facility, building something she says could not exist at scale without Amazon beneath it.

Delgadillo will clock in Tuesday at 3 a.m. She will sort packages in the dark while the rest of the Inland Empire sleeps. She will push a cart full of totes toward a loading dock. She will keep organizing.

In Tolleson, Amazon is already testing what comes next. The MK30 drone, FAA-approved and built for suburban backyards, no driver required.

The drone flies twice as far as its predecessor and is 50% quieter to the human ear. It carries packages up to five pounds and delivers them in under an hour, deploying from a hybrid facility that fulfills, sorts and delivers all from one site.

The same facility that employs workers sorting packages before sunrise is testing the technology that may eventually change what that shift looks like entirely.

And Bezos's ambitions are not just Earth-bound.

He has plowed some of Amazon's fortunes to fund a space exploration company called Blue Origin, which he founded in 2000.

In January 2025, the company reached orbit for the first time with its New Glenn rocket. Blue Origin is now preparing a demonstration flight of its Blue Moon lunar lander, part of a broader goal to build a permanent human presence beyond Earth.

Amazon began as a bet that the internet would change how people shop. Three decades later it has changed how Americans work, watch, eat, read, store their data and receive their medicine. It has reshaped labor markets and retail corridors, living rooms and loading docks. The cardboard box still lands quietly at the front door, but system behind it keeps expanding.

How the list was selected

The USA TODAY list of 50 Iconic Brands identifies American companies that have profoundly shaped the nation’s identity, economy and culture. The list is not definitive. Editorial selection factors included historical significance, industry-building innovation, measurable economic influence and lasting cultural impact. These brands were chosen for transforming daily life or becoming enduring symbols of American values. Long-term relevance and sustained national influence carried greater weight than short-term financial performance or recent popularity. Brands did not have a role in shaping the list or our coverage to ensure journalistic independence and to maintain the credibility of the selections.

Rey Covarrubias Jr. covers business and breaking news for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Email him at: [email protected], and connect with him on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky and X (formerly Twitter) at @ReyCJrAZ.