I talked to some Amazon product managers, they said the narrative was closer to "we had to learn how to scale to meet the holiday shopping season" than "we had

I talked to some Amazon product managers, they said the narrative was closer to "we had to learn how to scale to meet the holiday shopping season" than "we had a bunch of extra capacity laying around". It's not a big leap of faith, look at how much business retail chains do over the holiday season, and imagine operating an e-commerce platform of Amazon's scale - you learn how to do elastic infrastructure pretty quickly, esp. with Bezos's legendary cheapness (doors for desks, etc.)