Amazon's revenue and America's craft-distillery count, climbing the same wall for two decades. The bourbon does not ship Prime in most jurisdictions. Amazon does not, in fact, distil anything. Yet the lines insist on holding hands.
Amazon's annual revenue grew from about 8.5 billion dollars in 2005 to over 575 billion by 2023 as the company expanded from books to everything. US craft distilleries grew from a few dozen to over 2,500 in the same window, riding state-level licensing reforms and the locavore wave that gave craft beer its lift in the previous decade. Both stories share a tailwind: the same two decades that scaled e-commerce also lowered barriers for small artisanal producers, with direct-to-consumer shipping and online discovery making a tiny distillery viable. Different scales, same plumbing.
Big and small both grew on the same network. The infrastructure was generous in both directions.
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