The article is unnecessarily long, but the anecdote is priceless -- it shows how clever and resourceful Bezos and his team had to be for the company to survive and thrive in its early days. Back then, book wholesalers had a 10-book order minimum, and Amazon wasn't yet big enough to order 10 books a day. So the team came up with an ingenious solution, which Bezos explained in a 1999 interview:
> We found a loophole. Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn't have to receive 10 books, you only had to order 10 books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, "Sorry, but we're out of the lichen book." One of these days we're going to get all those lichen books dumped onto our front lawn.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 18.2 ms ] thread> We found a loophole. Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn't have to receive 10 books, you only had to order 10 books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, "Sorry, but we're out of the lichen book." One of these days we're going to get all those lichen books dumped onto our front lawn.