For all of Prime’s success, there was one glaring weakness in the product assortment Amazon offered to members: perishable foods like dairy, produce, and meats that grocery stores—and Walmart—specialized in.
Aware of this shortcoming, Amazon had been working on catching up to its megacompetitor for quite some time. All the way back in 2005, Doug Herrington—formerly of Webvan—joined the online retailer at the executive level, where he pitched Jeff Bezos on the idea for a nationwide grocery delivery service.
Herrington requested a $60 million investment to launch the program, but Bezos only agreed to a scaled-down $7 million beta test in Seattle. No one inside or outside of Amazon was having much luck figuring out how to make online grocery delivery services profitable back then, so Amazon’s top leader prioritized major investments in other areas. By 2012, though, Herrington made clear his frustration about the service not being available outside its home market, and did so in quite the Amazon way: with a strongly worded internal memo.
“We can’t reach our $400 billion aspirations with today’s business model, and there’s good reason to fear we won’t make the necessary transformation,” Herrington wrote, according to journalist Brad Stone’s book Amazon Unbound.
The memo would earn Herrington a green light on a small geographic expansion of Amazon Fresh from its only existing market of Seattle to parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco. But even for Prime members lucky enough to be in those locations, the service still came at the steep price of $299 a year, versus the $79 annual fee that Amazon was charging Prime members at the time. In short, the vast majority of Amazon customers didn’t even have the option to purchase perishable groceries from the online retailer, and that Achilles’ heel would no doubt limit the company’s ambitions for world domination if it wasn’t rectified.
Yet as Amazon continued to tinker with pricing and delivery methods for fresh groceries, another category of grocery store purchases was perhaps just as important to Amazon’s future, and one that would seemingly be easier to penetrate: so-called consumer packaged goods (CPG), or “consumables,” for short.
This broad retail category encompasses essentially any type of nonperishable food, household, or personal health product that you use or consume, and then toss in the trash (or recycling bin). Basically, stuff that needs regular replenishment, and would typically be stored in a pantry, cabinet, or underneath a sink. Think bottled beverages like soda and water, chips, cereal, and canned soups in the food category. Or soap, deodorant, and shampoo in personal care. Or Clorox spray and paper plates in the home supply category. These goods are often not sexy nor inspiring. But they are core to daily American life. Thus the market was huge: at around $850 billion in US sales every year. This was Herrington’s opportunity to pursue his biggest goal.
If Amazon wanted to reach the same retail heights as Walmart—let alone surpass it—the company would have to figure out how to sell more of the same low-priced consumables that customers most frequently purchase from standard grocery and big-box stores. These items, in an ideal world, would keep Amazon customers coming back to the online retailer over and over again. And the more they might do that, the less they’d be tempted to enter the doors or website of Amazon’s old-school competition.
“Selling a book or a TV is great and super helpful,” Herrington, now CEO of Amazon’s entire global e-commerce and physical store businesses, told me in late 2021, “[but] how many times do I buy a book or TV each week versus how many times do I buy a packaged goods item, or some toilet paper or some food?”
CRaP Is King
By the early-2010s, Amazon had become a go-to destination for several CPG products, including coffee K-Cups, bulk packs of cereal and candy, and especially diapers, despite being less than profitable. Amazon was unafraid to use diapers as loss leaders to attract new parents to its website and hopefully make more profit from them over their lifetimes. It was a key reason why Amazon was so intent on either decimating, or acquiring, Marc Lore’s Diapers.com.
For lower-price points, though—say consumables that cost $10 or less, which make up a majority of CPG categories—things got a lot trickier for Amazon, and the company was having trouble making a real sizable dent in that market.
Herrington knew the challenges of the sector all too well. He had previously consulted with CPG companies as a partner at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he worked for nearly a decade. Then, during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, he oversaw marketing for Webvan, the online grocery startup that delivered same-day orders before going belly-up in 2001 in the wake of rapid, unprofitable expansion. Different Webvan veterans had different versions of what went wrong. But no matter the reasons for Webvan’s demise, Herrington long remained undeterred about the power of the idea even if the economics of the business at times seemed unsolvable.
At Amazon, Herrington quickly garnered respect from his staff without instilling fear, a common tactic used by Bezos and other hard-charging business leaders. Those who worked for him told me that Herrington—who once had aspirations of becoming a US senator—was competitive, but even-keeled and affable. Upon joining Amazon in 2005, consumables “was an almost nonexistent category with . . . twenty people working on it,” he told me in 2021. “I was vice president of a very small empire when I came in, but the aspiration was, ‘Let’s try to improve this experience for customers.’”
Herrington told his then-small staff that he wanted their culture to be one of a bias toward action, “with a calm and quiet confidence,” according to Justin Leigh, a former product manager in the group.
Relative to other Amazon leaders, Herrington was “more mild-mannered, fair, empathetic,” said Andrea Leigh, Justin’s wife, who rose to the level of general manager at Amazon during a nearly decade-long career there that included stints on grocery and consumables teams.
That confidence would be put to the test often. The challenges of selling groceries online, whether perishable or shelf-stable, are plentiful. Grocery stores have notoriously low net profit margins to begin with, typically between 1 percent and 2 percent.1 That’s even when customers are the ones doing all the work of driving to the store and shopping themselves. But if you add in the costs that a retailer spends to sell those same items online—massive warehouses, delivery trucks, and the staff to handle those orders—the economics can quickly turn downright ugly, and upside down.
That was a big reason why, by 2013, the Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service was still far from a sure thing. It was clear, however, that customers were willing to order nonperishable groceries such as consumables online if the pricing was similar to what they were paying in physical stores.
The problem for Amazon was that Prime, for all its benefits, had trained Amazon shoppers to place orders one item at a time. Need a new baseball glove for your kid? Search, click, buy. Need a new humidifier filter for dry winter days? Search, click, buy. There was a certain beauty in this simplicity that rivals marveled over.
But that simplicity actually worked against the company’s best interests when it came to low-priced consumer goods, and especially ones that were heavy (and therefore expensive) to ship. If you’re an online retailer, you want customers buying more items per order when it comes to low-priced merchandise so there’s a better chance that the order total can cover warehousing and shipping costs. A key factor in Amazon’s present-day success was a significant blocker to its future ambition.
“Our units per order were very, very low, and that’s counter to what you need for groceries or consumables,” said Jennifer Pann, an eighteen-year veteran of Amazon who oversaw grocery supply chain and inventory-planning teams.
Up to that point, Amazon had come up with largely imperfect solutions for selling consumables like deodorant or soda without destroying the company’s finances. At times, these goods were available only as so-called add-on items that could be ordered in addition to a separate, larger order—maybe alongside a Kindle or a few books, for example—which gave Amazon more revenue per order to try to turn a profit. At other times, Amazon, or merchants who sell as third parties on the Amazon Marketplace, would price the goods much higher than grocery stores, with the fulfillment and shipping costs essentially baked into the product price. On other occasions, Amazon would make the economics work by selling, say, a six-pack of deodorant instead of a single stick, since the higher price point could maybe, just maybe, make up for the shipping expense that Amazon would have to pay to get the order from one of its warehouses to a customer’s doorstep.
Each of these options came with a trade-off, and for a company that prides itself on its vision of being “Earth’s most customer-centric company,” those trade-offs were a threat to what Amazon officials considered paramount: customer trust. So, in 2013, Herrington began dabbling with an idea to overcome the profitability challenges, and hopefully help Amazon better compete with Walmart and other big retailers in the grocery and CPG categories. Herrington’s new idea all started with one of the most common purchases that shoppers make, regardless of the store: Diet Coke.
Win the Pantry
“What do we have to do to be able to deliver a twelve-pack of Diet Coke to anybody in the US for the same price [as in a] Target or Walmart?” Herrington recalled as the spark for the new service.
Why the obsession with Diet Coke? Well, twelve-packs of Diet Coke come with common CPG challenges. The price point is low, at around $5, but the weight is substantial, at about ten pounds. Shipping it by FedEx truck could cost more than the product itself. Amazon’s internal name for items like that pack of Diet Coke is CRaP: “Can’t Realize a Profit.” Memorable in a way.
The hope was that someday, Amazon Fresh would grow into a nationwide service and make these points moot by giving Amazon the ability to sell CPG goods alongside fresh groceries in large, frequent customer orders. But that wasn’t the reality back in 2013–14, and Herrington and team were impatient.
As a result of this, the former Webvan exec and other Amazon staff began brainstorming a new service that would eventually launch with the name Prime Pantry, and be exclusive to Prime members. Herrington wrote the original Pantry PRFAQ document, a type of internal memo documenting how a new Amazon product or service might be received by the press in an ideal world, as well as how the company should answer likely questions about the new service. A near-final draft of Herrington’s memo began with an imaginary New York Times article under the headline “Amazon’s Prime Pantry Phenomenon”:
“Done,” Nicole Sherwood smiled proudly, laying her iPhone on the table. “I just finished off my Pantry order with a 12-pack of Diet Coke for $3.99 and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios for $3.59. Those prices are a lot better than Safeway’s—even better than I can get at my local Target or Wal-Mart. And it will be on my doorstep by Thursday, so no more trying to squeeze in a trip to the club store this weekend, between the kids’ soccer games.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know how they do it, but I’m hooked.”
Getting past the cheesiness of the faux news article, the memo made clear that the primary appeal of Prime Pantry was supposed to be the prices. More specifically, prices on everyday pantry and household goods that might even beat the in-store prices of a certain family-owned, Arkansas-based retail behemoth.
“So what’s all the fuss about?” Herrington’s memo continues. “The price. Items in the Pantry store are typically equal to or lower than Wal-Mart and your local club stores.”
These were items like twelve-packs of Diet Coke, canned foods and bagged snacks, detergent, toothpaste, and toilet paper. With a bigger order total, Amazon might have a better shot at being able to afford the packing and shipping costs associated with making a bigger splash in the CPG space, and competing more fiercely in an area that was Walmart’s strength.
On the backend, though, it was a complicated mess. Amazon needed to make sure every item available through Pantry could be shipped out of a single warehouse closest to a given customer, to cut down on costs. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was a key to another business that Amazon had purchased a few years earlier: Marc Lore’s Quidsi, which owned Diapers.com.
“When we bought Quidsi, we learned that their cost structure was a lot better than ours for fulfillment,” said Pann, the longtime Amazon veteran with expertise in grocery inventory planning.
But even with that warehouse constraint and others, Amazon leaders were still concerned about making the financials work. At the time, Amazon wasn’t swimming in profits like it would be in future years. As a result, it was decided the service would also have to come with a fee of $5.99 per Prime Pantry order, even though Prime members were already paying an extra $99 a year at the time for faster shipping speeds and access to Prime’s streaming music and video catalogues.
It was a curious decision and, unsurprisingly, not everyone was thrilled about it. At the time, Greg Greeley was the head of Amazon Prime and thus the biggest internal advocate for Prime customers. Greeley told me he argued against such a cost, believing it would be a nonstarter for many Prime members who expected to receive all of their orders with no additional shipping fee. Instead, he was more in favor of adding an order minimum to the program to incentivize multi-item orders that could cover Amazon’s costs on their own.
“There was a lot of debate,” Greeley told me years later. “I’ll leave it there.”
At Amazon, debate is encouraged if not expected. It’s even codified in the company’s Leadership Principles. Among them: “Have a backbone; disagree and commit.”
“Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” it reads. But, the principle concludes with, “Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.”
That last sentence is key. Greeley ended up committing to launching with the added $5.99 fee, even though he did not believe it was the ideal solution and had, as the head of Prime, veto power to block it.
Years later, Herrington told me that the group opted for a per-box fee versus, say, a $50 order minimum, because they feared customers might order $50 worth of items like bottled water, which would require multiple boxes instead of just one, and result in shipping costs that almost certainly would lead to unprofitable orders.
“If you want to order fifty dollars’ worth of water, that’s fine, it’s going to take five boxes [with a $5.99 fee per box],” Herrington recounted to me in late 2021 of the model that Pantry ended up launching with. “[But] if you want to be a little bit more clever about this, you can probably get your water, some chips, some of this and some of that” and get it all shipped in one box for $5.99.
Stephenie Landry, the executive with day-to-day responsibility for the creation and launch of the Pantry program, was a rising star in Amazon’s retail division. She had worked as a chief of staff of sorts—known as a technical adviser or “shadow” internally—for Jeff Wilke, Herrington’s boss and Bezos’s deputy who first oversaw the warehouse overhaul that made Amazon Prime possible. (Wilke later rose through the ranks to run Amazon’s entire core retail business globally, a position that Herrington was named to in 2022.) Landry had led the original Amazon Fresh grocery delivery test back in Seattle in the mid-2000s and had a hand in managing several other services that launched under Herrington.
The user experience that Landry ended up crafting was a new one for Amazon: the Pantry web page showed a digital representation of a brown shipping box, and as customers added items to their Pantry shopping cart, the page updated to show shoppers what percentage of the box was filled. It was novel, but potentially confusing.
What was invisible to the customer was the calculations Amazon was doing on the backend to decide what constituted a full box: either goods that weighed forty-five pounds or took up four cubic feet of space, whichever happened first.
In the early years of the service, Amazon highlighted two key benefits offered by Prime Pantry:
“Save on the Essentials—Low prices and additional savings with hundreds of coupons,” giving shoppers small discounts that the CPG brands were often expected to offer.
“Shop Everyday Sizes—No more buying in bulk. Buy what you need, when you need.” In the past, Amazon shoppers interested in buying tuna fish from the online retailer might have had to resort to buying a twenty-four-can pack when they only wanted a few cans, because a pack size like that was the only way it made sense for the company to sell the low-priced product.
Behind the scenes, a small Prime Pantry “project team,” in Amazon parlance, helped hone the idea and plan out the execution, before responsibility for the program would be handed over to a separate team that would run the service on the backend once it launched. But problems were identified when key internal experts like Pann, the inventory specialist, were looped in just a month before launch and realized the plan on paper had no chance of being successful when put into practice. There were many issues that boiled down to a gross underestimation of how long it would take to sell through the goods Amazon was ordering by the pallet from CPG brands. Amazon was purchasing this merchandise by the pallet to make it more efficient for Amazon warehouses to receive them, but Amazon sold through various types of consumable goods at differing rates, and that caused problems. While a pallet of laundry detergent might consist of 150 containers that could be sold through in a couple of weeks, a pallet of tuna cans might include 1,500 units that would take months to sell through one by one.
“They just took this very academic approach of like, if we buy it in bulk and we ship it to customers in [singles], it’ll work out,” Pann told me. “But nobody put pen to paper in the sense of, ‘What does that mean?’”
It was just math, as Marc Lore would say, and the math most definitely did not work. Even with last-minute adjustments to the operations plan, the work going on behind customers’ computer screens was bumpy from the start. Vendor relations staff had to corral CPG brands and convince them to join the new program, which was no easy task. To make the shipping economics work, even with the additional $5.99 fee, Amazon had to figure out how to tweak its technology to funnel each Prime Pantry order to the right Prime Pantry warehouse so that the order could make it to the customer’s home by truck and not have to be shipped via plane. It was, in short, a logistical headache of grand proportions.
On the front end, some customers were turned off by the additional $5.99 shipping fee. They were already paying for Prime, after all. Others were confused or frustrated by the quantity minimums required to ship a single Pantry box, according to various Amazon executives. To make matters worse, Amazon made customers use different virtual shopping carts for Prime orders, Amazon Fresh orders, and Prime Pantry orders, respectively, and at times displayed different prices for similar items depending on which Amazon service they were being ordered through.
“It was complicated, and I’m not proud of where we ended up,” Greeley, the former Prime boss, admitted to me. “Having a different cart with a different search or worse—and this is the thing I hated—different prices. It was the Walmart trap. Even knowing the program, I could get stuck [wondering], ‘Why is this price different?’”
CPG Bully
Amazon continued to tweak the Pantry business model to try to attract more customers, all while attempting to make the economics work. At the same time, in typical Amazon fashion, it continued to invest in other ways to sell consumables to customers, even at the risk of redundancy.
There was Prime Now, a two-hour delivery service in metro areas that launched in late 2013 to combat the threat of Instacart and the now-defunct Google Express. Landry, the up-and-coming executive who oversaw the Pantry launch, would eventually move over to run Prime Now full-time. Then there was Amazon Fresh, the longtime grocery delivery offering that shipped perishables as well as shelf-stable goods out of Amazon warehouses. And there was still the regular Amazon.com storefront, through which Amazon continued to sell some CPG goods that either didn’t need the Pantry model to be profitable or were too important to Amazon to lock behind the Pantry wall.
In early 2017, I began hearing from nervous executives at CPG companies like Unilever, PepsiCo, and Kimberly-Clark that Amazon and Walmart were engaged in an all-out pricing war, and some of America’s most popular consumable brands had become caught in the crossfire.2 One of the main issues, they told me, was that Amazon’s price-matching algorithm was identifying the lowest price per unit or per ounce for a given product—even if it was in a huge bulk-size pack at Costco—and then applying it across the same type of good on Amazon, even when the pack size was much smaller. This, they explained, had a long trickle-down impact.
Say Costco was selling a forty-pack of juice boxes for $12, or around 30 cents per juice box. But Amazon was selling a much smaller pack of the same item, such as a six-pack. Amazon’s algorithm would match the per-box price of 30 cents from the Costco forty-pack and apply it to the six-pack on Amazon, even though that would mean Amazon was charging just $1.80 for the six-pack, with seemingly no possible way of turning a profit when factoring in shipping costs. Walmart would see this and assume that the juice box brand was giving Amazon a better wholesale price and would pressure the brand to cut the wholesale price for Walmart so Walmart could match Amazon’s price.
The saga didn’t end there. Even though these newly unprofitable products were partly the result of their own price-matching technology, Amazon employees would often ratchet up the pressure on CPG brands for better wholesale prices as well, unafraid to kick popular products off the site as leverage. For example, on a random Friday in February 2017, all Pampers diapers sold by Amazon disappeared from the site. The talk of the industry was that Amazon executives may have kicked the entire Pampers portfolio off Amazon.com during a negotiation over wholesale prices, which would be a very big deal in the retail world. Neither company would confirm or deny the speculation when I inquired at the time, but former Amazon employees later told me the speculation was quite plausible because Amazon had been known to boot top CPG brands like Tide off the site as leverage during annual negotiations. Lore’s mafia analogy didn’t seem so crazy after all.
These one-sided negotiations, according to executives, reminded many in the CPG world of that other major retailer: Walmart. The CPG conglomerates that produce the toothpaste, snacks, and shampoo that would typically keep customers coming back to big-box or grocery stores again and again had grown accustomed to such dealings with the Bentonville bully, which saw every penny of cost saved through tough negotiations as a penny that would go back into consumers’ pockets. To Sam Walton and the Walmart leaders who followed him, that was the retailer’s entire reason for being: savings. Anyone standing in the way of those savings should either submit or retreat.
But in negotiations with Amazon, top executives from large CPG companies say, the tech giant also developed a reputation in the 2010s for making uniquely unreasonable demands despite repeatedly failing to hit projections. Separate from the ramifications of the pricing battle involving the regular Amazon.com storefront, there were several years where Amazon Fresh failed to launch in as many new geographic areas as employees had promised some of the CPG companies that supplied it with the inventory to sell. But, like clockwork, Amazon staff would show up at negotiation sessions the following year with corporate amnesia—little acknowledgment of its failure to hit its numbers, and the same aggressive demands of up-front investment dollars that the CPG companies would need to commit to have their products included in the customer offering.
“For the most part, they’ve underdelivered on promises for years, yet continue to ask for astronomical levels of supported investment with promises to deliver something that doesn’t happen,” a top executive of a popular snack brand told me. He requested anonymity to speak freely about the relationship with Amazon, because his company has no choice but to continue doing business with the tech giant.
Inside Unilever, the maker of brands like Hellmann’s, Dove, and Vaseline, tensions with Amazon reached a boiling point in the mid-2010s. During a meeting between the two companies, one of Amazon Fresh’s midlevel leaders made what Unilever execs considered to be ridiculous financial demands and backed them up with even more ridiculous reasoning:
“‘You need to understand that Jeff Bezos says we have to operate this business at a profit, so that’s why we have to ask you for these investments,’” the Amazon Fresh manager said, according to someone who was present at the meeting. “This was a really smart person who had spent time at McKinsey and had a really big, fancy degree.”
One Unilever executive was flabbergasted by Amazon’s “logic” and confronted the Fresh manager in front of several dozen staff members from both companies, who were in attendance.
“So that means we can’t make money for you to make money?” the Unilever executive asked. “You’re basically saying that your model doesn’t work.”
The Amazon Fresh manager’s face lit up red as the CPG executive predicted what might come next. Eventually, he said, the brick-and-mortar grocery giants were going to get their act together and transform into formidable digital-savvy foes. At that point, Amazon would have a considerable problem on its hands.
“Nobody’s going to want to play with you,” the executive told them, “because you were such a pain in the ass.”
Years later, Amazon would be forced to confront just such a reality as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world. As a result, Walmart and others attracted new customers to their online grocery services, and thus more interest from CPG brands.
In an interview, Landry, the Amazon VP responsible for the company’s global grocery delivery services, appeared perplexed by the litany of complaints that CPG industry execs relayed to me. It seemed hard to believe that she hadn’t heard some version of them over the years. But what was believable was her claim that she doesn’t spend much time worrying about such critiques.
“We have been engaged in trying to invent something that didn’t exist in a big way before,” she told me in 2021, “and I find that our vendors have wanted to participate in creating that future and have been very happy to work with us.”
Pantry’s Closed
In early 2021, Amazon announced that the Pantry service would be shut down and, in typical Amazon fashion, put a positive spin on the news.
“As part of our commitment to delivering the best possible customer experience, we have decided to transfer Amazon Pantry selection to the main Amazon.com store so customers can get everyday household products faster, without an extra subscription or purchase requirement,” a spokesperson said in an email.3
Amazon’s grocery offerings had come a long way between the launch of Amazon Pantry in 2014 and its shutdown in 2021. And that progress made Pantry less of a priority by 2021 than it was in the mid-2010s. But I was curious—I wanted to see how much of the Amazon spokesperson’s statement held true; that is, would the same twelve-can pack of Diet Coke—which was so pivotal in the creation of Prime Pantry—really be available to customers at a good price, “without an extra subscription or purchase requirement,” after Pantry’s selection was supposedly folded into the main Amazon.com storefront?
So, in December 2021, I searched Amazon for that twelve-pack of Diet Coke that Herrington told me had started it all. The top search result showed a price of $16.27. I did a double take. The item would be shipped and sold by a third-party Amazon merchant that was almost certainly baking the shipping costs into the product price itself. At the same time, it didn’t appear that Amazon was carrying the Diet Coke on its own, and when I specifically searched the Amazon Fresh selection instead of the broader Amazon.com grocery catalogue, a message indicated that Diet Coke cans were out of stock.
Even though we don’t regularly buy soda in our household, the $16.27 price sounded high. And it was. Reports from 2014 show that Amazon was selling the same Diet Coke twelve-pack for less than $4 through Prime Pantry shortly after launch.4 As for comparable prices in 2021, I found a local New Jersey Walmart Supercenter near me was selling the same twelve-pack for almost $10 cheaper than the Amazon merchant. For that price, I could order it online and pick it up at the Walmart Supercenter, or add it to a larger Walmart.com order of at least $35 to have it shipped to me for free. Even if I wanted Walmart to deliver the twelve-pack to me on its own, with nothing else, it would cost $12.27, including a $5.99 shipping fee, or about $4 cheaper than through Amazon. Either way, this 2021 snapshot signaled that Amazon still had more work to do to make mainstream grocery brands available to online shoppers at affordable prices, no matter what the company communicated to the press when Pantry folded.
“I’ve had many failed innovations here,” Herrington told me in 2021, reflecting on Pantry’s demise, “and I think it was probably a bridge too far [to involve] the customer in the challenges of the consumables grocery product category.”
Landry said it seemed that “customers just didn’t want to think in that way,” and that Pantry’s limited selection—about two thousand items at launch—was problematic. “They wanted to be able to add what they wanted.”
Not surprisingly, both executives said the arc of the Pantry life cycle represents a feature of the Amazon method of invention, rather than a bug in the system: come up with a proposed solution to an identified problem, test it at scale, learn stuff along the way, and fold it when necessary—while keeping open the possibility that the idea could one day be resurrected.
“All of these things that we’re working on are very likely to come back in slightly different forms based on consumers’ willingness to try new things,” Landry told me. “Technology developments, making the experience better, there’s just so many different factors at play. None of these ideas are necessarily bad ideas if they didn’t work at the time; it just might be that the execution or the time isn’t right.”
Others I spoke to, however, had a slightly different view: that Pantry stood out from other Amazon failures not for where it ended, but where it started: with concerns about profit and losses—something that former Amazon employees who later took jobs at Walmart would tell me was a key obstacle to innovation at their new workplace, and something they didn’t often encounter at Amazon.
“It felt like one of the first times that we didn’t start with the customer [in mind],” a former Amazon senior manager told me years later of Prime Pantry.
Still, Amazon had another card up its sleeve in the CPG and grocery wars, and a nearly $14 billion one at that. On a Friday morning in late spring 2017, Amazon put Walmart on notice that it was doubling down on grocery sales, and its ambitions were no longer strictly digital.