It's getting hard for me to remember pre-Amazon. I know I bought books in the first few months of operation, when that was all they sold.
For our children, Amazon is eternal.
This holiday the Amazon boxes made one heck of a pile. Between the things we bought and Amazon gift certs from aunts and uncles the store in the cloud provided over 80% of the kid stuff (including things like the scope that came from Orion via the Amazon storefront).
We're clearly not typical of anything, but I'm looking forward to seeing how they did against the competition (though I expect nobody did great this year).
Incidentally, one fringe benefit of Amazon is that the gifts are concealed. Prying eyes are much less of a problem.
PS. Not that Amazon is perfect. In theory you can cancel mistaken orders even after they've been placed. In practice that doesn't work for affiliates, the orders still get processed. I didn't say I loved Amazon.
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