Anika Begay
Earlier this year, Amazon reported $143.3 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2024. But 27 years ago, the BBC wondered when predictions that the internet would revolutionize shopping would come true, speaking to local bakers, booksellers, and even Jeff Bezos to find out.
The monetary program report, originally broadcast in November 1997, has recently been added to the BBC Archive YouTube channel. In it, reporter Nils Blythe takes a simulated journey down the information superhighway, complete with wonderfully dated 1990s blue screen effects and graphics, and talks to retailers who were having varying degrees of success with online trading at the time.
Among them were a small bakery in the United Kingdom that was making several thousand dollars in sales each year selling its baked goods internationally, and the British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, which was enjoying moderate success selling groceries over the Internet, telephone, and even fax.
Blythe also spoke to Jeff Bezos, who had launched Amazon.com as an online bookseller just two years earlier. Bezos boasted that Amazon’s catalog of more than 2.5 million books was ten times larger than what the largest brick-and-mortar bookstores could stock, and predicted that “over a period of many years…selling books on the Internet will be a very big business.” He was mostly right, four years before Amazon turned a profit for the first time.
