If You Posted Amazon's Numbers, You'd Be Fired

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

As Jeff Bezos introduced the world to the Fire Phone a few days back, complete with its ready-to-kill-retail-as-we-know-it Firefly app, the company’s stock price hovered somewhere around the $330 mark. Dang, wish I would have grabbed some of that while it was cheap. Had I done so, I’d be cashing out right about now.

Don’t get me wrong, Amazon’s awesome in its own right, and while my forecast for the Fire Phone is gloomy (more on that in an upcoming column), the company will remain a juggernaut until Bezos loses it completely and starts crashing delivery drones into houses and airliners.

But the fear and loathing of Amazon among my brick-and-mortar brethren has got to stop. This is a company that’s done some truly amazing and innovative things, and made very little money (relatively speaking) for its effort.

Let’s make some comparisons. While Bezos was raking in record 2013 holiday sales and breaking the capacity of our nation’s parcel carriers in the process, former Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel was in the throes of the worst consumer credit card data breach in history. By the looks of things, Q4 2013 saw Amazon breaking records and Target breaking down.

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