Amazon has had billions of orders since its inception. But one of them is very special and even makes founder Jeff Bezos smile today.
Online shipping giant Amazon started in 1995 as a small bookseller on the still relatively new Internet. In the first few months, an extremely strange Amazon order and payment process occurred. In 2002, Jeff Bezos told the story at a lecture at MIT.
Amazon order from Bulgaria with strange payment
For the first three years, Amazon was exclusive to the United States of America. Founder Jeff Bezos was all the more astonished when he received an order from Bulgaria just a few months after the start. A country where Amazon is still not available to this day. In the lecture to the MIT students, Bezos even said that he didn’t even know at the time that Bulgaria even had access to the Internet.
The young company accepted the order anyway. As if that wasn’t extraordinary enough, the strangest part of the story is yet to come.
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Clever and unique payment method!
The customers didn’t want to pay by credit card. One reason could simply be that they didn’t have a credit card. These were already standard in the USA, but hardly ever circulated in Europe. According to Bezos, the Bulgarians therefore paid in cash. They are said to have taken two shiny new $100 bills from the bank. But instead of simply sending them by post, they came up with something special. Fearing that the money might be stolen, they folded the bills into small pieces and hid them in a floppy disk.
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More specifically, customers squeeze their bills under the metal window shutter. They put the disk in the envelope along with a note.
According to Bezos, the following message in English was in the envelope: “The money is in the disk. Customs officials are stealing money but they don’t understand English.”
The clever Bulgarians added the order number so that Amazon could allocate the money and ship the books.