We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that because we believe, and we have to take this as an article of faith, that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.
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If we can arrange things in such a way that our interests are aligned with our customers, then in the long term that will work out really well for customers and it will work out really well for Amazon.
Our judgment is that relentlessly returning efficiency improvements and scale economies to customers in the form of lower prices creates a virtuous cycle that leads over the long term to a much larger dollar amount of free cash flow, and thereby to a much more valuable Amazon.com.
Customers want to save money and time and have the broadest assortment of items, and we think that by bringing e-commerce and digital capabilities together with the stores, we can do things that a pure e-commerce player can't.
We cannot, don't want to, and won't let ourselves walk away from opening price points and customers that depend on us for low prices. That's foundational.
If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you're competing against a lot of people. But if you're willingto invest on a seven-year time horizon, you're now competing against a fraction of those people... Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We're willing to plant seeds, let them grow-and we're very stubborn. We say we're stubborn on vision and flexible on details.
Most big technology companies are competitor focused. They see what others are doing, and then work to fast follow. In contrast, 90 to 95 percent of what we build in AWS is driven by what customers tell us they want.
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