Monday, 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 566,000 employees and around 45,000 robots to pack and ship the annual $178 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 $454 billion or nearly 9 percent of all retail sales.
You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online here.
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