The stars all lined up and the news gods were kind. And boy did Amazon cash-in. We had the opportunity to spend about 24 hours working Cyber Monday at Amazon’s giant Phoenix fulfillment center. The building is so big that Amazon says you can park three or four 747’s inside the building. From a perch high above the building floor, you can witness the madness as hundreds and hundreds of employees work various shifts and production lines to ensure your order arrives accurately and on-time.
As you can imagine, Cyber Monday at Amazon draws a lot of attention from both local and network TV news crews, newspapers, on-line publications, radio and any other media you can think of. We have covered Cyber Monday at this location before but have never quite seen as much attention and news coverage as this year. Why? Can you say slow news week? Scanning the headlines on Monday there was no election to worry about, no weather, no national tragedy or breaking news that merited much attention. So, the media stuck with Cyber Monday, and scheduled live broadcasts and stories the day before, the day of, and the day after. Amazon sent most if not all of their Seattle based PR staff to provide support and they did a great job.
The results are in. According to Amazon, the 2012 version of Cyber Monday was the sites biggest order day ever. Their popular Kindle doubled sales numbers from last year. The PR staff had worked around the clock for roughly 72 hours and their bodies had begun to breakdown with some staff catching colds. But they will tell you it was worth it.
Amazon rode the wave.