Amazon annual revenue

It is a curious fact, and one that most people find out rather too late in life, that the amount of money Americans spend on pet food moves in almost perfect synchronisation with the total revenue of a company that started by selling books from a garage in Seattle. One might think these two things had nothing whatsoever to do with each other, which is precisely what makes them moving together at a 0.981 correlation so deeply unsettling. We have apparently built an economy in which the prosperity of Jeff Bezos and the kibble supply chain rise and fall as one.

The real explanation, which is somehow less comforting, is probably that both are simply passengers on the same underlying current of American affluence and anxiety. Between 2005 and 2022, the US economy expanded (with a hiccup in 2008), more people acquired pets as emotional support during increasingly isolating lives, and Amazon grew to dominate retail by promising us everything tomorrow. Pet food spending nearly doubled from about 18 billion dollars to 35 billion dollars in those years, which is roughly what Americans now spend annually on shoes for dogs they photograph daily. Both trends reflect the same basic phenomenon: middle-class households with disposable income looking for comfort, convenience, and small warm things to care for.

What this tells us is mostly that correlation remains a marvellously unreliable narrator of causation, even when the correlation is so strong it feels like it should mean something. Amazon and pet food are not actually connected by any mechanism we understand; they are simply both expressions of the same deeper economic tides. Two boats rising together on the same tide tell us nothing about each other, only about the moon.