But then who hasn't absent-mindedly clicked at something in an idle moment at work, or while watching telly in your pyjamas, and, in what's a small miracle of modern life, received a familiar brown cardboard package dropping on to your doormat a day later. Amazon is successful for a reason. It is brilliant at what it does. "It solved these huge challenges," says Brad Stone. "It mastered the chaos of storing tens of millions of products and figuring out how to get them to people, on time, without fail, and no one else has come even close." We didn't just pick and pack more than 155,000 items on my first day. We picked and packed the right items and sent them to the right customers. "We didn't miss a single order," our section manager tells us with proper pride.