7 insane facts that reveal how big Amazon has become

Jeff Bezos

Amazon is hardly the same company it was in 1999, when e-commerce was still a relatively small industry and the budding online retailer exclusively sold books.

Today, the world's fourth-most valuable company ships a mind-boggling number of goods to billions of people around the world.

By some accounts, it has essentially created America's largest company town in Seattle. Recently, Amazon announced plans to spend $5 billion on a second headquarters, for 50,000 employees, somewhere in North America.

There are a number of ways to look at Amazon's size, and each is just as unfathomable as the last.

7.5% of Seattle's working-age population are Amazon employees.

Amazon has more than 300,000 employees worldwide, and 40,000 in Seattle alone.

As a portion of the city's working-age population — roughly 528,000 — that comes out to 7.5% of the city working at Amazon.

For perspective, if the same portion of New York City's adults worked for one company, that company would have about 488,000 locals on staff.

Amazon accounts for 43% of all online sales.

Amazon used to be a way to buy books online; today, it's the default buying site for just about everything, especially for people who have Amazon Prime.

An analysis by Slice Intelligence released in February found that 43% of all US online retail sales were done through Amazon in 2016.

That's up from 33% in 2015 and 25% in 2012.

1 out of every 4 US adults has Amazon Prime.

Speaking of Amazon Prime, the company now counts approximately 63 million people among its subscriber base, or about 25% of the total US adult population.

That number may underestimate the true coverage, however, since it doesn't account for multiple adults in one household all sharing the same Prime account.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider