The traditional way of buying books is to visit a bookshop, or perhaps join a book club. In 1995 Jeff Bezos went a step further and started an on-line book retailing business from his garage. His mission was “to use the Internet to transform book buying into the fastest, easiest, and most enjoyable shopping experience possible.” His aim of stocking every book in print soon made Amazon.com the world’s largest book retailer. In its first full year of operation its sales were $15.7 million, and rose by 34% a month. Stock was turning over 150 times a year, compared with three or four times a year for a normal bookshop. To develop their logistics, Amazon looked at the best practices and recruited the Vice President of logistics (and 15 other staff) from Wal-Mart.