One-Click Shopping Is Economically Unsustainable

To hear him tell it, Jeff Bezos loves stories.

Not necessarily the ones contained in books — those items that propelled Amazon’s rise from its beginnings in a Seattle garage in 1994 to the global behemoth it is today. Bezos started out by selling books not out of any literary affection but because they were a useful commodity, the kind that could give a fledgling online marketplace a competitive edge. (Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” helped him to develop his personal “regret-minimization framework.”) The storytelling he exalts is purely functional, a seamless amalgam of his engineering training and his libertarian inclinations: “Build yourself a great story.”