U.S. Census Bureau Daily Feature for July 16: On-Line Shopping

WASHINGTON, July 16, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Following is the daily "Profile America" feature from the U.S. Census Bureau:

JULY 16: ON-LINE SHOPPING

Profile America — Sunday, July 16th. On this date in 1995, a small start-up company launched its business of selling books online out of a two-car garage in Bellevue, Washington. The first item purchased was a book titled "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought." The 1995 garage operation was Amazon.com. The company now has some 340,000 employees and around 45,000 robots to pack and ship the annual $136 billion worth of books and much else. Not all of America's 28,000 electronic shopping ventures do so well, but last year internet sales totaled nearly $395 billion, or over 8 percent of all retail sales. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online at www.census.gov.

Sources:
Amazon launch and first sale/accessed 4/27/2017: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/here-is-the-first-book-ever-ordered-on-amazon/264344/
Went public /accessed 4/27/2017: www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/amazon-com-inc-history/ 
Amazon employees/accessed 4/27/2017: www.statista.com/topics/846/amazon/ 
Robots and annual sales/accessed 4/27/2017: http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/amazon-statistics/ 
Market capitalization/accessed 54/27/2017: http://www.dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm 
2015 e-commerce sales/NAICS 4541: www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/pdf/ec_current.pdf 
Number of electronic shopping establishments/County Business Patterns/NAICS 45411: https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/BP/2015/00A1//naics~454111

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SOURCE U.S. Census Bureau