> such as down-ranking items that are a better match for what the customer is looking for because they aren't immediately available What struck me about the WB

> such as down-ranking items that are a better match for what the customer is looking for because they aren't immediately available What struck me about the WBR is this assumption they're making about the customer's desire. > The backlog indicated the amount of work we’d need to do to make sure our customers received their gifts before the holidays. How many of these people don't care if their product arrives before December 24th? You never, ever bothered to ask them. If it's even 5% of the orders during this period that customers don't care about arriving before December 25th then you could have made logistics easier by just asking this question. And as Amazon grew to become the "everything store", a greater proportion of mid-December orders are ones that the customer doesn't need by December 24th. If you ever bothered to ask the question you'd make the holiday rush so much easier. Instead you make Amazon inconvenient for the customers who don't want to be a bother, by forcing the customer to put off submitting orders until after the holiday.