Amazon annual revenue

It is a curious fact, and one that would probably amuse whatever cosmic force governs the universe's sense of irony, that the amount of money Amazon has made since 2010 and the price British people pay for a pint of lager have moved in almost perfect tandem, as though one were simply a very expensive reflection of the other. What this suggests about humanity is not flattering: we are apparently so committed to finding patterns that we have now discovered a relationship between Jeff Bezos's net worth and the landlord's pricing strategy in Swindon. The correlation is 0.965, which is to say it is almost certainly meaningless.

But here is what makes this genuinely interesting, if you are the sort of person who finds economic confounding variables interesting, which I apparently am: both variables are almost certainly tracking the same underlying force, which is inflation. The UK pint price has climbed from about £2.80 in 2010 to roughly £4.20 by 2023, a climb that feels sharp when you are standing at the bar but is actually just the pound doing what pounds do. Amazon's revenue, meanwhile, has soared from $34 billion to $575 billion, which sounds like one company getting exponentially more powerful until you remember that everyone's revenue looks that way when you measure it in pounds that are slowly becoming less valuable, and when you account for the fact that the entire global e-commerce market was doubling in size every few years. Both trends are simply inflation and economic growth doing their quiet, relentless work in the background.

The real lesson is not that Amazon and British pubs are mysteriously connected, but that when two large economic quantities move through the same time period, they will almost certainly move in the same direction, for the simple reason that they live in the same economy. We are pattern-seeking animals living in a world of genuine patterns, which means we will occasionally spot relationships that are real but meaningless, and we will probably never learn to tell the difference. Amazon's revenue and lager prices rose together because the world got richer and the pound got weaker.