Welcome to the Amazon.com Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I'm David Zapolsky, Senior Vice President and General Counsel. I now call the formal portion of this meeting to order. This is our 26th annual meeting since we became a public company. Today's agenda covers our items of business and rules of procedure. Please note that in the event an unanticipated issue prevents us from being able to continue this annual meeting, we will post updated meeting information on our investor relations website. After the proposals have been presented, we will have a presentation by Brian Olsavsky, our CFO. Angie Quennell, Director of Financial Communications, will then moderate the Q&A session with Andy Jassy, our CEO. Angie, can you provide details on how to submit a question?
Thanks, David. If you wish to submit a question and have not already done so prior to the meeting, please type your question into the Ask a Question field on the website you've used to access this meeting, and click Submit. Out of respect for your fellow shareholders, we ask that each person be concise and limit themselves to one question.
Thank you. It's now my pleasure to introduce our directors who are attending this meeting, including those joining us remotely. Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, Keith Alexander, Edith Cooper, Jamie Gorelick, Daniel Huttenlocher, Judy McGrath, Indra Nooyi, Jon Rubinstein, Patty Stonesifer , and Wendell Weeks. Also joining us remotely today are representatives of our auditors, Ernst & Young. The polls opened for voting on all matters at the beginning of the meeting. We will close the polls after presentation of today's proposals. The proposals to be voted on today are set forth in our proxy statement. If you wish to vote during the meeting, please follow the instructions on the meeting website before the polls close. If you have already voted in advance of the meeting, you do not need to vote again unless you requested a legal proxy or wish to change your vote.
A representative of Broadridge was appointed our Inspector of Elections, has taken the required oath, and has certified that notice of this meeting was mailed beginning on April 13, 2023 to all shareholders of record as of the record date, and that a majority of our common stock is present or represented by proxies. A quorum exists for the meeting. I'll now introduce the company's proposals, which are the election of directors, the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young as independent auditors for fiscal 2023, an advisory vote to approve executive compensation, an advisory vote on the frequency of future advisory votes on executive compensation, and the reapproval of our 1997 stock incentive plan as amended and restated for purposes of French tax law. We have 18 shareholder proposals to be voted on if properly presented.
To ensure that we have adequate time for our Q&A session later in the meeting, each proponent will have two minutes to present their proposal. If a proponent goes beyond two minutes, we will need to place the line on mute so that we can continue the meeting. Thank you in advance for your understanding. Grant Bradski will now introduce proposal number six, requesting a report on retirement option, retirement plan options. Mr. Bradski has re-prerecorded the following statement.
Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to present this proposal. I'm Grant Bradski from the shareholder representative As You Sow. This shareholder resolution is of the utmost importance as it asks the critical question: How will Amazon protect its employees' life savings from the economic consequences of climate change? Climate change poses material risk to retirement plan beneficiaries. The CDP reports that 215 global companies, including Amazon, have almost $1 trillion at risk from climate impacts, with many losses expected within the next 5 years. More than half of Amazon employees are invested in the company's default target date option, which is heavily exposed to high carbon and deforestation-intensive industries. These investments contribute to climate change, create systemic portfolio risk, and are poor long-term investments for younger beneficiaries whose retirement benefits are likely to be harmed due to climate-related financial losses.
Amazon knows we must address climate risks head-on. It's why shareholders are proud of our company's climate goal of 100% renewable energy by 2025 and its $2 billion investment in The Climate Pledge Fund, which was created to encourage businesses to reach net zero by 2040. How will we meet these goals if Amazon is at the same time directing over $1 billion of employee 401(k) savings into fossil fuels and burning down the Amazon? These investments undermine the company's climate goals, expose employees' savings to financial risk, and harm the company's reputation on climate, which may make it difficult to attract and retain top employee talent and could expose the company to litigation risk, as occurred recently.
Just as Amazon has taken operational climate action, shareholders ask that Amazon now begin to address the climate impacts of the billions of dollars being invested in fossil fuels by our retirement plan. This will not only protect our company from the economic impacts of climate change but protect our employees' life savings from these same risks. Thank you.
Thank you. Laith Abad will now introduce proposal number seven, requesting a report on customer due diligence. Operator, please open the line for Mr. Abaid.
Good morning. My name is Laith Abad, and I'm a software engineer at Amazon Games and a first-generation Palestinian American. I am here to present resolution 7 on behalf of the American Baptist Home Mission Society and co-filers. The proposal calls on Amazon to commission an independent third-party report on its process for customer due diligence to determine whether customers' use of its surveillance products and services contributes to human rights violations. As an Amazon employee, I can say confidently that my coworkers and I want to work at a company that stands for the human rights of all people. Proponents again offer this proposal to encourage the company to meaningfully assess the impacts of high-risk technologies and contracts with government agencies and strengthen due diligence processes in areas where there are gaps.
Technologies like Ring doorbell and facial recognition can be used to increase widespread surveillance, which furthers racist policing, infringes on privacy, and violates the human rights of communities of color. As a Palestinian American, I am especially concerned with Amazon's contract with the Israeli military and government known as Project Nimbus. This contract provides powerful technology to an army accused of war crimes and a government that's enforcing an oppressive system of apartheid, a crime against humanity, according to Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the UN, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, and others. Palestinian families live every day under deeply intrusive surveillance, fear of violence, being forced from their homes, and even death. My own father was ethnically cleansed from his homeland of Palestine by the Israeli government, as well as many other relatives. This is deeply personal, and I know I'm not alone.
As Amazon employees, we want to ensure that the tech we build and sell doesn't harm our own communities and those of our users. Shareholders and employees want to see Amazon take responsibility and lead the way on ending tech-driven human rights abuses. Amazon's business should support human dignity and a fair and just society for all people, not power, oppression, division, and discrimination. I hereby move proposal seven, which requests a customer due diligence report. Thank you.
Thank you. Dana Floberg will now introduce proposal number 8, requesting reporting on content and product removal restrictions. Ms. Floberg has pre-recorded the following statement.
Hello, my name is Dana Floberg. I'm the advocacy director at Open MIC, I'm here to present item number eight regarding transparency reporting on removal and restriction of content. The proposal asks the board to revise the company's transparency reporting to include quantitative data regarding content and products the company removes in response to or in anticipation of government requests. Reporting suggests that the company has removed products and censored user content on Amazon's e-commerce platform at the behest of authoritarian governments and in excess of the requirements of local laws. Investors require improved transparency reporting in order to adequately assess whether Amazon is acting in compliance with its internationally recognized human rights commitments. Without this transparency, the company is likely to be the continued target of negative press and lawsuits that stand to substantially harm performance.
The specific improvements requested by the proposal are standard across e-commerce platforms and other technology companies, meaning that Amazon's current reporting falls far short of peer companies such as Alphabet, Apple, and Meta, earning it the moniker of by far the least transparent U.S.-based tech company from independent analysts at nonprofit Ranking Digital Rights. Despite this, the company has refused to engage with the proponents of this proposal. Instead, the company chose to reject the proposal out of hand without even a conversation with investors. We believe improved transparency would be in the best interests of Amazon and its shareholders. I urge shareholders to vote for item 8 to improve the company's transparency reporting.
Thank you. Paul Chesser will now introduce proposal number nine, requesting a report on content removal requests. Mr. Chesser has pre-recorded the following statement.
Amazon totally misses our point in its statement of opposition to our proposal, which asks for a report on requests the company has received from all branches of the U.S. government. All we ask is for the company to list incidents in which a government official has requested content to be removed from Amazon's platforms. Amazon throws a bunch of lawyerly language about irrelevant policies and procedures in its opposition statement to distract from our simple request. For the purposes of our proposal's request, my organization doesn't care about Amazon's sales policies. Likewise, my organization doesn't care about Amazon's legal compliance measures, and my organization doesn't care about Amazon's content guidelines, and my organization doesn't care about Amazon's community guidelines. We also don't care how Amazon enforces any of these policies and guidelines.
To summarize and simplify, all we care about for the purpose of this, of this proposal is for Amazon to tell us who in the federal government has asked for content removal, when these government officials did it, how Amazon responded to these government officials, and why the company responded the way it did. All the information we ask for is irrelevant to any policies and processes Amazon cites in its opposition statement to our proposal. There is nothing that prevents the company from providing this information, with perhaps a few exceptions in law enforcement situations. Those, by far, don't account for the majority of requests Amazon has received to censor content. Believe me, this is about illegal and unconstitutional censorship, not about law enforcement. Amazon obviously does not want to disclose this information
As we learned from the X -Files, big tech companies willfully complied in working with government to censor based on speech and ideology. Consequently, we now ask who in the government is Amazon covering up for? Please vote for proposal number 9.
Thank you. Rajpal Singh will now introduce proposal number 10, requesting additional reporting on stakeholder impacts. Operator, please open the line for Mr. Singh.
Good morning. My name is Rajpal Singh. I've worked as a driver for Amazon's delivery service provider in Palmdale, California, for two and a half years. I'm among the 80 brave drivers who recently joined the Teamsters union. I'm here to formally move item 10, which calls for a just climate transition strategy for Amazon workers like me. Amazon boasts about its climate pledge, but this company is silent on how its climate strategy will be fair and just to workers and our communities. Amazon is one of the world's largest employers with over one and a half million workers. The workers cannot be overlooked. What should a just transition look like for drivers like me? It means not penalizing us for returning undelivered packages when it's unsafe to work outside in brutal 100-plus degree wet heat.
My coworkers and I work in desert conditions, so we experience this firsthand. It demands Amazon recognize we are Amazon employees. After all, we wear Amazon uniforms and drive Amazon vans for a DSP that Amazon controls. Amazon pledges to electrify its last mile delivery vehicles, but denies responsibility for those deliveries. Amazon needs to answer how with 3,000 DSPs it will electrify these fleets without unjustly placing the cost on DSPs and workers. A just transition begins with respecting workers' rights to organize and collectively bargain to ensure they have a seat at the table. There can be no just transition at Amazon if as it decarbonizes, the company continues to trample over the rights of its workers. A just transition begins with respecting and listening to workers like me. It certainly doesn't begin by threatening to take our jobs away. We are fighting back.
You can stand with us by donating at http://ibt.io/adsolidarityfund. Amazon doesn't listen, it doesn't respect, that's why I urge shareholders to support item 10. Thank you.
Thank you. Father Seamus Finn will now introduce proposal number 11, requesting alternative tax reporting. Father Finn has pre-recorded the following statement.
Fellow shareholders and members of the board of directors, my name is Father Seamus Finn, and I'm here on behalf of the Greater Manchester Pension Fund, Monday Asset Management, and the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate to move shareholder proposal number 11. Our proposal calls on Amazon to align with other leading multinational companies and use the Global Reporting Initiative tax standard. The GRI is the most widely used sustainability standard and is the only comprehensive global tax reporting standard today. A transition to the GRI standard will not require a drastic transformation for our company. Our company already submits country by country reporting to OECD tax authorities. The GRI standard provides transparency of our company's approach to the taxes, tax governance, controls and risk management, and public country by country reporting.
In a world faced by multiple crises, the scrutiny of corporate tax payments is likely to increase year-over-year. If investors are to make informed assessments of Amazon's tax strategy and evaluations of the company's tax risks, we need accurate, accessible, and transparent data on a country-by-country basis. Tax authorities are already starting to mandate greater transparency and accountability in corporate tax reporting and in Australia to soon make public country-by-country reporting mandatory. We believe that companies demonstrating leadership stand to benefit from staying ahead of the curve. We encourage the board to be thoughtful leaders and embrace tax transparency, we urge fellow shareholders to vote for shareholder proposal number 11. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Bruce Herbert will now introduce proposal number 12, requesting additional reporting on climate lobbying. Mr. Herbert has pre-recorded the following statement.
Thank you. Good morning. I am Bruce Herbert of Newground Social Investment. I stand to move proposal number 12, the climate lobbying proposal on behalf of NewGround and the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Proposal 12 seeks consistency and leadership from Amazon in aligning its political influence activities with the company's established climate change goals. First, let me commend Amazon for taking a leadership stance in declaring a net zero by 2040 target for its greenhouse gas emissions. Industry peers and NGO experts recognize that a favorable and consistent regulatory environment is critical to achieving important climate targets. The challenge is that numerous trade associations which receive funding from Amazon do not themselves believe in climate change.
Examples include the American Enterprise Institute, the Americans for Tax Reform, and the US Chamber of Commerce, which between them have received failing marks for denying climate science, funding a host of anti-climate organizations, and frequently acting as if paid lobbyists for the oil and gas industry. Policy misalignment also happens when companies say one thing, then just do another without third-party interference, which we see Amazon and others repeatedly doing. Details on this are in a formal report we recently submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Three responses are needed to counter the threat posed by misalignment between our company and the actions of trade associations and other rogue parties. First, the company needs to assess and report to shareholders on its political influence activities. However, in a manner that highlights where there is divergence between company goals and the undermining activities these groups are taking.
Second, the company needs to articulate and report on what steps it takes when it does find divergence between itself and those that receive funding from Amazon. Merely saying there's a difference of opinion does not address misalignment. Lastly, in all quadrants, Amazon needs to insist on a level playing field, one that ensures all parties are aligned around critical climate priorities, so others cannot take shortcuts which disadvantage pledged companies like Amazon. In closing, there is grave need for consistency, alignment, and rapid progress on tackling climate change. The report this proposal requests is needed because the company's direct actions are often not consistent with its stated policies, and the positions taken by groups that Amazon funds are often outrageously hostile to Amazon's public commitments. Therefore, please join us in voting for proposal number 12. Thank you.
Thank you. Ronald Sewell will now introduce proposal number 13, requesting additional reporting on gender and racial pay. Mr. Sewell has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning. My name is Ronald Sewell, and I am an Amazon associate working at ATL6 in East Point, Georgia. Today, I am speaking on behalf of investment management firm Arjuna Capital to move proposal 13, asking for a report on medium racial and gender pay gaps as a mean to address structural pay inequity at Amazon. As an associate and shareholder, I want Amazon to be a better company and place to work. That's why my coworkers and I are organizing to improve our working conditions. As the cost of living rises, we are struggling to support our families due to low wages, unstable schedules, and a lack of upward mobility. While Amazon claims it supports associates in growing their careers, many of my coworkers have applied to open positions repeatedly and are denied with no explanation.
When associates don't feel like they have a path forward, they leave, contributing to Amazon turnover problem. Amazon continued to only report its statistically adjusted pay gaps, which assesses whether minorities and women are paid the same as their white male peers within the same roles. This data does not account for who holds what jobs, ignoring the structural racism, sexism that can relegate people of color and women into low-paying job categories. Arjuna Capital proposal asks for a median pay data so investors can understand who has access to the higher-paying position at Amazon and how that changes over time. Currently, at least 40 U.S. companies have committed to reporting on median pay data. Warehouse associates and shareholders would like to see Amazon do the same. Thank you for your support of transparent and honest pay equity accounting.
Thank you. Sarah Rehberg will now introduce proposal number 14, requesting an analysis of costs associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Ms. Rehberg has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to speak in support of item number 14, which would require a cost-benefit analysis of the company's DEI programs. The company's DEI webpage sets forth several commitments to increasing representation of women and Black employees in certain positions. What DEI policies such as these overlook is that there is much disagreement across the ideological spectrum over whether instead of combating discrimination, DEI practices actually create a discriminatory environment due to its insistence on placing service-level characteristics such as race and sex above merit. In doing so, DEI policies can lead to discrimination against groups that the company doesn't recognize as diverse. That's why our proposal seeks to ensure that all employees, not just those deemed diverse by the company, feel included and receive equal treatment when it comes to workplace dynamics and career advancement.
The company's statement in opposition to our proposal states that its policies and procedures are intended to foster diversity and inclusion and promote respect for all people. It's difficult to see how the company's DEI initiatives fosters diversity, inclusion, and respect for all individuals when it sets hiring goals based on race and sex. Whatever the intention, surface characteristic-based hiring creates a discriminatory environment where it is impossible for all employees to feel truly included and respected. Voting yes on item number 14 would provide shareholders and the public with an impartial assessment of how the company is potentially causing discrimination in the name of opposing it. Thank you.
Thank you. James McRitchie will now introduce proposal number 15, requesting an amendment to our bylaws to require shareholder approval for certain future amendments. Mr. McRitchie has pre-recorded the following statement.
In 2002, I petitioned the SEC for proxy access. It took three rulemakings and a court battle, but 20 years later, 81% of S&P 500 companies have something called proxy access. Unfortunately, almost all bylaws require nominating groups hold 3% for 3 years, and groups are limited to 20 members. Proxy access can't really be done without at least one of the Big Four. They administer retirement savings plans for companies and have never even filed a shareholder proposal, so proxy access has gone unused. Now, after decades, the SEC adopted Rule 14a-19, allowing shareholders to split our votes between board nominees and challengers without attending annual meetings. Shareholders are concerned that universal proxy rule will go the way of so-called proxy access.
After reading bylaws adopted by Masimo, Bloomberg's Matt Levine wrote that company bylaws might demand challengers submit disclosures on paper woven from unicorn manes with requirements waived for the board nominees. There should be some limits on what boards can require without seeking shareholder approval in advance, or at least within a year or so after adoption. I filed 30 proposals like the one before you. We reached agreements at about one-third of the companies based on guardrails that preserve the rule's intent. All shareholder proposals are advisory. Even if we win overwhelmingly here, boards are free to ignore them or to adopt whatever they please.
Your vote for this proposal can help us reach a similar agreement at Amazon, either before the next annual meeting or after an even higher vote next year based on a revised proposal that reflects agreements reached with other companies to protect the rights of shareholders. Please vote for proposal number 15. Thank you.
Thank you. Chris Smalls will now introduce proposal number 16, requesting additional reporting on freedom of association. Operator, please open the line for Mr. Smalls.
Thank you. Good morning. Good afternoon, shareholders of Amazon. My name is Chris Smalls. I'm the founder and President of the Amazon Labor Union. Amazon pledges to become Earth's best employer and Earth's safest place to work. It also publicly says it respects workers' rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining. Despite Amazon's public commitment, Amazon workers have accused the company of conduct that violates both ILO conventions and national law protecting freedom of association and collective bargaining rights. Many workers experience Amazon anti-union tactics, including intimidation, retaliation, and division every day. I have experienced these tactics when I was terminated in 2020 after working 4.5 years of Amazon for speaking out over health and safety. On April first of 2022, the workers of JFK8 Fulfillment Center on Staten Island voted to become the first union in American history for Amazon.
During this historical campaign, Amazon spent over $14.2 million of your money battling its workers who just wanted to exercise their fundamental right to form a union. Without a union, Amazon workers will not be able to collectively defend their rights as workers and establish better working conditions, better pay, and better benefits. Our efforts here in America have been felt around the globe. Many workers are now fighting to form their own unions in their countries as well. The movement will only continue to grow. Our struggle has been felt by many shareholders of Amazon who demand accountability for the way it treats its workers today.
I am moving proposal number 16, calling on the board to conduct a third-party assessment of Amazon adherence to stated commitment to workers' freedom of association and collective bargaining rights, including the respect of the International Labour Organization core labor standards. The ALU and the 8,300 members that I represent here in Staten Island are ready to negotiate our first contract. In addition, we are asking that Amazon come to the table and do the right thing by its workers. Thank you.
Thank you. Isaiah Thomas will now introduce proposal number 17, requesting a new policy regarding our executive compensation process. Mr. Thomas has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning. My name is Isaiah Thomas. I hereby introduce shareholder proposal item number 17 on behalf of the AFL-CIO Reserve Fund. The proposal requests that the board of directors take in consideration the pay of the company's workforce when setting target amounts for CEO compensation. I am an employee at Amazon's warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. On behalf of my fellow coworkers, we want you to know that working in an Amazon warehouse is hard, demanding work. The pace of our work is set by a computer algorithm. We are subject to discipline if we do not stay on pace. We feel like the company treats us like robots and not as the human beings that we are. In 2021, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy received over $212 million in total compensation.
This was 6,474 times the total compensation of Amazon's median employee in 2021. While Amazon's CEO-to-worker pay ratio fell in 2022, we believe that Amazon's history of high CEO pay shows why this proposal is necessary. The pay ratio between the CEO and the company's employees matters to me and my coworkers at Amazon. I can tell you that a high CEO-to-worker pay ratio hurts our morale as employees. Like Amazon's CEO, we deserve a fair return on our work. According to the proxy statement, Amazon's CEO pay is set using a peer group. Even if you target CEO pay at the peer group average, other companies may cherry-pick their peers to select companies with higher CEO pay. As a result, CEO pay is guaranteed to rise for all peer group companies.
I and my coworkers believe that all Amazon employees deserve to be paid fairly in accordance with the demanding work that we do. Amazon depends on the contributions of its entire workforce to succeed. All we ask is that you consider whether the CEO pay is in alignment with the rest of the workforce. For those reasons, we urge you to vote in favor of this proposal. Thank you.
Thank you. Jacqueline Sadashige will now introduce proposal number 18, requesting additional reporting on animal welfare standards. Ms. Sadashige has pre-recorded the following statement.
Whole Foods misleadingly claims that its animal welfare standards for meat and other animal-derived products are stronger than most anywhere, encompass how the animals are raised, transported, and slaughtered, and that a traceable audit system tracks animals from birth to slaughter. Yet Whole Foods has a history of selling animal-derived products from suppliers implicated in an array of atrocities to animals. At Whole Foods self-proclaimed supplier of happy meat, Sweet Stem Farm, sick and injured pigs languished for weeks without veterinary care, several with bloody rectal prolapses. Chickens at Nellie's Free Range Eggs, another Whole Foods supplier, had the tips of their beaks cut off to prevent stress-induced cannibalism.
Last October, following a PETA investigation into a Whole Foods supplier, Pennsylvania State Police filed 141 cruelty charges, more than in any case of cruelty to factory farmed animals in U.S. history, against 12 former workers at Plainville Farms, a company claiming to produce humane turkey. Workers repeatedly and viciously kicked and stomped on turkeys each night, and birds convulsed after workers tried but failed to break their necks. Two workers were recorded mimicking masturbation and rape with injured and dying birds. Most recently, PETA Asia's latest investigation into the use and abuse of monkey labor in the Thai coconut industry implicated a supplier of Whole Foods' 365 brand. Endangered pigtail macaques are illegally snatched from the wild, chained, whipped, and forced to spend long hours picking heavy coconuts.
Whole Foods' history of selling meat and other animal-derived products from suppliers in blatant violation of its animal welfare standards jeopardizes our company's reputation. We urge shareholders to vote that Amazon issue a report evaluating the efficacy and shortcomings of Whole Foods' animal welfare standards and auditing procedures that have failed to prevent egregious cruelty in the company's supply chain.
Thank you. Jing Zhao will now introduce a proposal number 19, requesting an additional board committee. Mr. Zhao has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning, fellow shareholders. Amazon has not but needs a public policy committee to assist the board to oversee public policy issues, including human rights, corporate social responsibility, diversity, equity, inclusion, climate pledge, renewable energy, net zero carbon, vendor chain management, charitable giving, political activity and expenditures, governmental regulations, international relations, unionization, and other public issues that affect Amazon's operations, performance, public reputation and shareholders' long-term value. Many public policy issues have been frequently voted at our shareholders meetings. 7% of the companies in the S&P 500 have a separate board committee responsible for public policy. For example, Microsoft established a regulatory and public policy committee in 2012 beside a governance and nomination committee.
Considering Amazon's giant size and the complex operations of business worldwide, even if only 0.7% of the companies in the S&P 500 have a public policy committee, Amazon must be one of them. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Jennifer Bates will now introduce proposal number 20, requesting an alternative director candidate policy. Ms. Bates has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning. My name is Jennifer Bates, and I'm here to present ballot proposal number 20 on behalf of Oxfam America and co-filers. The proposal calls on Amazon to consider hourly associates as candidates for the board of directors. I've worked at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, for over 3 years. Some of you may recognize me from last year when we filed this resolution. Amazon has failed to take meaningful steps to amplify worker voice at the management level, despite the fact that the channel and worker voice serves as a key tool for mitigating investor risk. On the contrary, in the years since I last presented to Amazon shareholders, the company has doubled down on its strategy to stifling worker voice and burying growing dissent, which is generating increased reputational and operational risk to the company.
On the heels of last year's successful vote to unionize Amazon Staten Island, instead of responding with good faith negotiations, they challenged with litigation. Instead of stifling worker voice, which could enable management to address worker concerns before they grow into PR disasters. Amazon should listen to us. We are speaking up about grueling hours, back-breaking physical labor, and fears of time off task. Employees should have a voice with the board and upper management so that these punishing labor practices are addressed head-on rather than hidden in ways that ultimately come to light. In fact, things are getting worse at Amazon. Leaked internal memo warned that the company could run out of workers in certain key markets in the next two years. This is not a good look for the company because the media, public, and lawmakers are listening to us.
The need for worker representation on the Amazon board is greater than ever today. It will create a sea change, opening the doors for management to understand our needs. Vote for proposal number 20, and we can make sure that the leadership understands its most important asset, the workers. Thank you.
Thank you. Evanda Clopton will now introduce proposal number 21, requesting a report on warehouse working conditions. Ms. Clopton has pre-recorded the following statement.
Good morning. My name is Evanda Clopton, I'm an Amazon associate for St. Louis, Missouri. Today, I'm speaking in support of proposal number 21, requesting that the board of directors commission an independent audit and report of Amazon warehouse working conditions. Why am I speaking in support of this proposal? Right now, Amazon warehouses aren't safe for workers like myself. How do I know this? I've seen it firsthand. Amazon high work rates and heavy surveillance are driving workers injuries. I've worked at Amazon for 5 years. I'm capped out at my pay, I feel dead when I leave work every day. At night, I go home and soak in a tub of Epsom salt to just get myself back together so I can start all over again. Otherwise, I don't think I could get out of bed. This isn't just happening in my facility.
While Jeff Bezos promised to make Amazon Earth's safest place to work, the injury rate at our warehouses has continued at crisis level. Last year, Amazon injury rate was more than twice as high as the rest of the warehouse industry. Nine OSHA investigations found the level of injury risk at Amazon violated the law, and 10 states have introduced new bills to limit warehouse quotas. Shareholders, how long do you think Amazon can keep this up? It's not too late for the company to prioritize both worker safety and profitability. Amazon has the resources and ingenuity to pay workers a living wage and to run the safest warehouse in the world. They must act now. That's why, shareholders, I'm asking you as both an Amazon worker and a fellow Amazon investor to vote in favor of item 21.
Thank you. Conrad MacKerron will now introduce proposal number 22, requesting a report on packaging materials. Operator, please open the line for Mr. MacKerron.
Good morning. I'm Conrad MacKerron, Senior Vice President of As You Sow, representing The George Gund Foundation, the filer of proposal 22. I'm here today to present for the third year a proposal asking the company to make a commitment to a significant reduction in its use of plastic packaging. Amazon's substantial use of plastic exposes the company to increased financial and reputational risk. It lags at least 17 other consumer goods companies, including Walmart and Target, who have established virgin plastic reduction goals. Plastic pollution is a continuing international environmental crisis, drawing top-of-mind attention from governments and citizens. Next week, negotiators from around the globe will gather in Paris to advance a binding global treaty to reduce plastic pollution. Our company provides only piecemeal disclosure about its use of plastic and has declined to commit to setting a specific plastic reduction goal.
Last year, Amazon finally released limited data about its plastic use, but still does not provide an overall baseline amount of plastic used throughout its supply chain. The company disputes the findings of environmental group Oceana, which has published separately generated estimates of how much plastic the company uses, but Amazon has resisted for years providing specific data to counter the Amazon data and allow investors to accurately assess its progress. Last year, this proposal received an impressive 49% support, more than any other ESG proposal on the proxy, indicating that many of the company's biggest investors see it as an important priority.
We urge investors to again send a strong message to management that if it wants to be an environmental leader, it must commit to a significant reduction in its use of plastic and provide comprehensive data on use so investors can accurately assess its progress in reducing plastic pollution. We urge your support for. I hereby move Proposal 22. Thank you.
Thank you. Brianna Harrington will now introduce proposal number 23, requesting a report on customer use of certain technologies. Operator, please open the line for Ms. Harrington.
Hello. In recognition of this proposal's inclusion in the proxy material for five consecutive years, today, I deliver to you a special message from Harrington Investments. Dear Amazon, it's our anniversary. Yes, we are celebrating with or without you. We prefer that you participate, but we've learned that despite what you tell shareholders, you really don't want our input.
You state you're willing to work constructively to address realistic issues and work towards solutions while we, the proponents, appear unwilling to acknowledge any action short of ceasing to offer recognition as sufficient. You declare Amazon as being an active participant in and contributor to these conversations around the responsible development and use of AI and helping lead the industry in these important conversations. How can this be true when we, the proponent, are disregarded entirely? When our albeit strained relationship came about in 2019, we envisioned this journey as an opportunity for growth, learning, and collaboration. Much has transpired since then. Black Lives Matter movement, a global pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Yet after all we've been through, and in the face of the groundswell of support that continues to surge in favor of a resolution, Amazon remains steadfast in its opposition to the modest measures requested. Whether or not you choose to engage with Harrington Investments, we too remain steadfast. Steadfast that an independent study on recognition is warranted and necessary to ensure earnest efforts are taken to thoroughly assess threats recognition potentially poses to civil liberties, freedom, and society at large. To dismiss these concerns is dangerous more now than ever. There is so much we cannot possibly foresee, adopting a passive wait-and-see approach is akin to being complicit in inflicting any subsequent harm resulting from the use and/or sale of this rapidly evolving tech. Mind you, prior studies indicate the disproportionate likelihood that those negatively impacted will be among the most vulnerable of demographics.
Further, there's no harm in obtaining external third-party expert insight on recognition, and at minimum will provide an additional safeguard. In closing, we reflect on the last half a decade we've been engaged in what we originally imagined might develop into an informed discourse and exchange of perspective, but this stalemate we have going on is getting stale. You have such potential for goodness, but you've grown so arrogant. Remember where you came from, those humble, benign origins as an online book retailer. Alas, in the spirit of progress, Harrington Investments wishes you a happy anniversary, Amazon. Here's to five more years. Cheers.
Thank you. The proxy statement for this meeting explains the reasons for the company's recommendation against each of the shareholder proposals appearing in the proxy statement. We've received some questions regarding the proposals. Thank you for those questions. In response, I invite you to review the board's statement and recommendation as applicable on each of the proposals as set forth in the company's proxy statements. That concludes the presentation of the proposals. The polls are now closed on all proposals, and the formal portion of this meeting is now adjourned. Based on preliminary voting results, each nominee for director received a majority of the votes cast for such nominee's election, so all 11 nominees have been duly elected.
The ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young, the advisory vote to approve our executive compensation, and the reapproval of our 1997 stock incentive plan as amended and restated for purposes of French tax law have each been approved by the requisite vote. A majority of the shares present and entitled to vote on the matter were voted in favor of the proposal on a 1-year frequency for the future advisory votes on executive compensation, and none of the shareholder proposals has been approved by the requisite vote. I would now like to introduce Brian Olsavsky, who will give a financial update after a short video.
At Amazon, we're relentlessly innovating on behalf of our customers. We exist to make customers' lives better and easier every day. From incredibly fast delivery.
What's unique about this site is that we store, pick, pack, sort, and deliver all from one facility, and that lets us get items that customers want blazingly fast.
To giving customers flexibility in the cloud.
The cloud, of course, is also the way to increase flexibility because we don't know what exactly's coming. Some people are gonna do really well, and you wanna be able to not drop that demand on the floor and be able to scale up resources instantaneously.
Our people. We continue to invest in offering competitive pay and benefits for our people around the world. These benefits include access to Amazon's Career Choice program.
I thought that was a great opportunity for me to advance my career. Applied for it and ended up completing that. When I found out that they pay for the bachelor's degree and there was not a lifetime cap of how much money you could spend, I decided to rejoin the Career Choice program.
Our planet. Amazon continues to make progress to become a more sustainable business.
Bringing a van from sketch to full-scale production in 2-3 years is a pretty crazy challenge. A lot of people thought Amazon and Rivian were nuts for signing up for it. When we're operating these electric delivery vans at scale, we'll be preventing millions of metric tons per year of carbon emissions.
Our communities. We work side by side with nonprofits and community partners around the world to build strong and inclusive communities, especially in places where our employees and their families live and work.
We're excited tonight to host our first Amazon Future Engineer scholarship social.
I'm definitely excited because my dream is, like, to go to college.
It's a way that I can really get into the STEM world.
Future engineers.
I feel really strongly that our best days are unquestionably in front of us.
Hello everyone. I'm Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's Chief Financial Officer. Today I will be providing a recap of our 2022 financial results, which will be followed by a shareholder Q&A with our CEO, Andy Jassy. In 2022, Amazon's net sales were $514 billion, representing a year-over-year increase of $44 billion or 13% growth excluding the impact of foreign exchange. This $44 billion in growth comes on the heels of a two-year period in 2020 and 2021, where we increased our annual revenue by nearly $190 billion. This step-up in sales was largely driven by our efforts to serve customers during the height of the pandemic. Now that demand patterns have stabilized, we've seen different customer behavior in response to the tighter economy.
Throughout 2022 and into early 2023, we are seeing customers look to stretch their budgets further with a focus on value. Our teams around the world work hard to deliver low prices and secure great deals for customers, particularly for last year's annual Prime Day event in July and our first ever Prime Early Access sale in October. These global sales events outperformed our expectations as customers responded to millions of deals across our growing selection. Third-party sellers remain a key contributor to that expanding selection. For the full year 2022, sellers represented 57% of all units sold on Amazon. That's the highest annual seller percentage mix we've ever had. Sellers help us to increase our selection for customers, and we work hard to ensure that sellers are growing their businesses on Amazon.
Sellers, vendors, and brands also continue to look to Amazon's advertising capabilities to reach customers even as the macro environment requires them to scrutinize their own marketing budgets. AWS continues to see enterprise customers of all sizes converting to the cloud. Customers are also working closely with our AWS teams to thoughtfully identify opportunities to reduce costs and optimize their spend. While these efforts can impact short-term revenue growth, it is in times like these that we can build long-term trust with our customers and build partnerships that will last as they continue their move to the cloud. Turning to our segment financial results, our North America segment sales grew to $316 billion, up 13% year-over-year.
International segment sales grew to $118 billion, down 8% year-over-year on an absolute dollar basis and up 4% excluding the impact of foreign exchange. We're enthusiastic about the businesses we're building internationally. In addition to our established international country offerings in Europe and Japan, we have added more than 10 new countries in the past five years, including Brazil, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates, to name a few. Across these geographies, we've continued to invest in the differentiated value of Prime and look to expand Prime household penetration. AWS segment sales grew to $80 billion, up 29% year-over-year, and now representing an annualized sales run rate of more than $85 billion.
As I mentioned previously, enterprise customers of all sizes evaluated ways to optimize their cloud spending beginning in around the third quarter of 2022, and our teams were there to assist, including help in shifting to lower cost services and reviewing for architectural best practices. This customer orientation is in our DNA and is key to how we seek to build these relationships for the long term. Stepping back, our customer pipeline remains healthy and robust, and there are many customers continuing to put plans in place to migrate to the cloud and commit to AWS over the long term, as well as customers continuing existing migrations. We continue to expand AWS's infrastructure footprint. In 2022, AWS launched new regions in Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates, plus a second region in India. In 2023, AWS launched a new region in Melbourne.
Operating income was $12 billion, down from $25 billion in 2021. Throughout much of last year, we continued to work through many of the post-pandemic impacts that began to affect businesses and consumers globally beginning in the second half of 2021, including labor shortages and inflation in wages, fuel prices, transportation costs, and ocean freight, to name a few. We're working hard to return our operations to their pre-pandemic efficiency levels and are encouraged with the progress we are making to improve productivity and streamline the cost in our fulfillment network coming out of 2022 and into the first quarter of 2023. Cash flow remains our most important long-term financial output metric. For 2022, operating cash flow was $47 billion, up 1% year-over-year.
We continue to place meaningful attention on improving cost efficiencies throughout the stores business and in reducing our cost to serve our customers while ensuring we maintain an outstanding customer experience. As we move into 2023, we are encouraged by what we see as we work to regionalize our operations and transportation network. We've been able to improve our inventory placement, reduce our touches per package, and increase our deliveries per hour, resulting in lower shipping and fulfillment cost per unit. Free cash flow is what remains of our operating cash flow after we invest in capital expenditures. In 2022, free cash flow was an outflow of $13 billion. Over the past couple of years, working capital has not been as efficient as it has been historically, given our conscious decision to hold higher weeks of cover for our inventory given the ongoing supply chain disruptions.
As we exited 2022 and move into the new year, we've seen solid inventory level improvement while continuing to manage healthy in-stock levels to support continued customer demand. We've also seen elevated levels of capital expenditures in the past few years as we built our network to handle the large increase in consumer demand.
In 2022, we invested approximately $59 billion towards our capital investments, which we define as the combination of capital expenditures plus equipment finance leases. Overall, capital investments were roughly flat year-over-year. We reduced our fulfillment and transportation investments by approximately $10 billion compared to 2021 as we've continued to moderate our build expectations to better align with post-pandemic demand levels. This was largely offset by increased investment of approximately $10 billion year-over-year in technology infrastructure, primarily to support our growing AWS consumer needs. In closing, I'm proud of all the work being done across the company to continue innovating, to obsess over customers, and to address our cost challenges despite an uncertain economic environment these past few years. It hasn't been easy, and we've had to take several actions to streamline costs.
I'm encouraged by our progress and look forward to seeing our teams delivering on exciting new projects and initiatives.
Thank you, Brian. I would now like to introduce Andy Jassy, who will make a few opening remarks and address questions we have received pursuant to the meeting rules of procedure.
Hi, I'm Andy Jassy, and thanks for taking the time to join us for Amazon's annual shareholder meeting. I want to start by thanking our customers, who include consumers, third-party selling partners, developers, enterprises, brands, and creators. Our customers are our inspiration. We appreciate their trust, and we're working hard to build customer experiences that we believe will meaningfully change what's possible for customers and matter to our business in the long term. I also want to recognize our more than 1.4 million employees for all their hard work. They continue to innovate, always with the customer as the central focus. I'm proud of the incredible dedication and effort from our employees all over the world and what they deliver for customers and communities, as well as their continued hard work to help protect the environment.
From my perspective, there's a lot to like about how our teams are delivering for customers and the results we're starting to see as we've been streamlining our costs and operations and investing deeply in further improving our customer experiences. I'm very optimistic about what lies ahead for Amazon and believe if we continue on this path, that we have the chance to emerge from the current macroeconomic environment relatively stronger than we've ever been. Our best days are in front of us. With that, I look forward to taking your questions.
Thanks, Andy. We'll now move to our first question, which is: What can customers look forward to in the coming years as far as delivery enhancements?
Fast, reliable delivery is an enduring priority for us, along with selection and low prices. It always has been, and it's why we've invested so much the last couple decades in our fulfillment network. We've always had a strong fulfillment network. As we expanded so much in the pandemic. Remember, we doubled the footprint of our fulfillment centers that we'd built in the first 25 years. We doubled it in about 18 months. Then we also built a last-mile transportation network the size of UPS, largely in those 18 months as well. As we did that, we ended up with a much larger network that was different and had a lot more facilities and nodes and associated connections. As such, it caused us to rethink everything in our fulfillment network. A good example of that is our U.S. fulfillment center network.
Historically, we had a national flat network. As we have a lot more facilities and connections, we found that certain sub-optimizations at prior scale, such as not having inventory in a facility close to an end customer, it just got amplified at this new scale, this new elbow of the curve and scale. We made the decision to regionalize this network. What we did was we created 8 interconnected regions in smaller geographic areas to better serve customers through lower costs and faster speeds. Each of these regions has broad relevant selection to operate in a largely self-sufficient way with some of the most meaningful and hard work that we had to do coming from optimizing the connections between this large amount of infrastructure. We rolled out this regional network in Q1, and we're really pleased with the results thus far.
We've got about 15% reduction in the distance items are traveling from fulfillment centers to customers. 12% decrease in touches or how often a package is handled. 76% of the products customers are ordering are now in facilities within their region versus 62% a year ago. That's a big difference in a short amount of time. What we're finding is that customers are using same-day delivery at an increased rate, about 50% year-over-year. In the first quarter alone, we saw it reaching nearly 26 million customers doing same-day delivery. Shorter distances traveled means faster delivery speed, lower costs, and better results for the environment. We're on track this year in 2023 for our fastest shipping speeds ever for Prime customers.
You're seeing us continue to find ways to make it easier and easier for customers to get packages quicker. We have one-day delivery now on more than 20 million items and growing. Same-day delivery, which gets products to customers in just a matter of hours, is available in 90 metro areas with selection of hundreds of thousands of items. We're not close to being done working on improving the speed of delivery for customers because we know it matters to them so much. A lot more coming.
Your next question is: What is Amazon doing in AI?
Well, we've been using machine learning and AI at Amazon for 25 plus years. It's been really deeply embedded into every business in which we operate. You can see it all over Amazon. If you look at the personal recommendations you see in our e-commerce business, that comes from AI. If you look at the pick paths that our associates in our fulfillment centers, pick items, those are AI algorithms. You look at Prime Air or our drones, or if you look at our Go stores, or if you look at Alexa, those are all fueled by machine learning and AI. It has been a very big part of our heritage for 25 years.
Over the last nine months or so, you've seen this new inflection point for AI with the advent of generative AI, and it's just made it much more accessible to a lot more people, and we're quite excited about it as well. I think it's still very early days in generative AI, but moving quickly, and we see it as having three key layers. You know, if at the bottom layer, you know, every company that does generative AI is gonna train models, and it's gonna run inference or predictions from those models on compute. The key factor in that compute is gonna be the chips that's in that compute.
To date, there's been pretty significant scarcity in the amount of, in the capacity of chips out there and in the options for customers on what they could run chip-wise there. It's why we've been investing for several years in our AWS business in building customized machine learning chips, and we have one that's focused just on training that we call Trainium, and we have one that's focused just on inference that's called Inferentia. We're on the second versions of both those chips, and the price-performance combination for those training and inference chips is very compelling relative to alternatives out there. We're very optimistic that a lot of these models will be trained on these AWS training and inference chips.
The middle layer of that stack really is around the large foundational models that people are gonna build generative AI on top of. If you look at these leading models, they take billions of dollars and many years to ultimately train. There's gonna be relatively few companies that wanna pursue that. What most companies tell us they want is they wanna use somebody else's very large foundational model and then customize it on their own data, making sure that their own data doesn't leak to the general model, but being able to customize that foundational model with their own data for their own application purposes, and then being able to have all the same capabilities they're used to using in the rest of their technology infrastructure platform.
That's why we announced Bedrock, which really is foundational models as a service. In Bedrock, we will expose some of our own large language models that we've been working on for several years that we call Titan, but we'll also give customers access to other third-party foundational models like Anthropic's, like Stability AI's, like AI21's, as people will use lots of different models, and they'll be able to use those as the foundation to then customize with their own data with the same security, the same privacy, and all the same platform features they're used to using in running their workloads in AWS that they can run with these Bedrock models as well. Then that top layer of the generative AI set of solutions is really the applications that you're gonna build on top of these foundational models.
There are gonna be a lot of these. We think one of the high potential early ones is a code assistant, and that's why we built CodeWhisperer that allows customers to use natural language to say things like, "I wanna build a video hosting website," and then CodeWhisperer generates that code for them to just deploy. It's a huge game changer with respect to developer productivity, and it's got a lot of early traction. You know, we're pursuing lots of applications ourselves inside of Amazon. Every single one of our businesses is using generative AI to reinvent customer experiences. While we'll pursue a number of those applications, many more will be built by external companies and developers, and we're quite optimistic that a lot of those applications will be built on top of AWS. It's, it's very early days in generative AI.
It's very high potential, and we're investing quite a bit in it and expect to be a leader.
Thanks, Andy. What can you tell us about the strategy for investing in Kuiper and other new business ventures like it? Are they worthwhile?
Well, we think about our big investments with a series of questions that we ask ourselves. The questions we tend to ask ourselves are, number one, if we're successful, can it be big and move the needle for Amazon with good return on invested capital returns? Number two, is it being well-served today? Number three, do we have a differentiated approach? Number four, do we have some competence in that area, and if not, can we acquire it quickly? If we like the answers to those questions, we'll pursue that big investment. Sometimes that process has led to pretty straightforward new areas for us. These were things like getting into other product categories besides books in the early days of Amazon or getting into different international geographies. Sometimes that process has led to inventions and investments that weren't as initially straightforward.
AWS is a good example of that, where there were a lot of people wondering why we were pursuing a technology infrastructure platform when we were really just a retailer. A lot of people questioned it internally, and a lot of people questioned it externally. Think about what a different company Amazon would be today if we hadn't pursued AWS. Kuiper, to me, is an example of one that might not have been predicted by people but makes a lot of sense when you look at that structural outline. There's over 400 million-plus households that today have little to no connectivity or broadband, and, you know, that's all capabilities and technology access that we take for granted today.
Just imagine what people who can't do so today could do with reliable connectivity, being able to do things like taking online education courses or using financial services or starting their own businesses or doing shopping or enjoying entertainment or just think about businesses and governments that need that broader coverage to improve their operations. Kuiper will change this for many, many people. It will be much more affordable and higher performance than alternatives that are out there today. We're launching two prototype satellites to test the end-to-end communications network this year, then plan to be in beta with commercial customers in 2024. We've released some of the technical details recently, already consumers, enterprises, and governments are quite excited about us providing Kuiper.
We believe inventions like Kuiper have a chance to change what's possible for many millions of customers and to be a very good business for Amazon.
Your next question is: While Amazon Ads is a big revenue driver for Amazon, how do you balance that with ensuring a great customer experience for shoppers?
Customer experience will always be paramount for us. Everything starts with the customer. Our strategies and tactics evolve backwards from there. That's always been true and always will be true. Most of our resource and time that we spend in advertising is spent on machine learning algorithms to ensure that the sponsor results people see on search results are relevant to what they're trying to find. We track it rigorously, and we're constantly refining the algorithms. Advertising, of course, is not new in retail. Retailers have been doing this for many decades, selling shelf space or end caps or placements in circulars. Unlike physical retailers, we can tailor the results to be relevant to what customers are actually searching for, given what we know about buying behaviors.
Because our ads are relevant for customers and much more so than you find in physical retail, customers click on those sponsor links a lot, which means they perform better for brands. This is a key reason why our ads business is continuing to grow at a good clip, despite the fact that we're in a very challenging time for ads-heavy businesses. I think it's also worth noting that we're still in the very early days of working through thoughtful placement in our video, live sports, audio, and grocery products. It's just early days for us in advertising, and we're excited about it.
A shareholder asks: International is so flaky with volatile currencies and administrative situations. Why are you even playing in that area?
Well, we're pretty excited about our international business. I think if you look at 2022, our international consumer segment was $118 billion in revenue, and that growth re-accelerated in Q1 of this year over Q4 of last year. You know, if you look at our international consumer business, it's a combination of established geographies. These are places like the U.K. and Germany and Japan and emerging countries that we've launched over the last several years. Now, our established international businesses are big enough at this point that they're not immune from macroeconomic issues, and you could see that over the last year. If you look at the compound annual growth rates of these established international businesses from 2019 to 2021, they're pretty remarkable.
31% in the U.K., 26% in Germany, 21% in Japan. That's pretty unusual. We're optimistic about this, how those businesses will continue to evolve and grow as we emerge from the current macroeconomic environment. I think we also have a number of new countries that we've launched over the last several years, these are places like India or Brazil or Mexico or Australia or lots of different countries in Europe, in the Middle East, in Northern Africa. What we find with these new geographies is that it takes a certain amount of fixed investment to get these locales going, and then you need a certain amount of revenue scale where the operating income and margin covers the fixed investment. We're really liking the trajectory.
It looks very much, for the most part, on the same trajectory as what we've seen in the US in our longer-standing, established international countries. We're quite bullish on building a large, profitable international stores business. We're on the right track.
Thanks, Andy. This will be the last shareholder question. I'm interested in the company's foray into health and think there's tremendous opportunity in service and care, but I'm curious where you are thinking you are going to take this.
Well, healthcare, the healthcare experience across the world, but I'll just start with the U.S., is a pretty rough experience for customers. Most customers are not happy with it, as such, our customers have been asking us for many years if we would provide a pharmacy solution. If you think about it's not that far an extension from what we do in retail. There's some regulatory pieces that are different, but it has many similarities. We launched a pharmacy offering in Amazon Pharmacy a few years ago. It's off to a good start. It's growing quickly. As we've built that business and as customers have gotten used to using us in the healthcare space, not surprisingly, they've asked us to help with more issues in their everyday healthcare experiences.
You know, if you think about for most customers, if you really wanna make a change and a meaningful impact in their healthcare experience, primary care is right in the middle of that experience. Just think about how we've all experienced primary care over the last several decades. I think about telling my grandkids that the way it was was that you had to call somebody three to four weeks in advance for an appointment, drive 20 minutes to the doctor's office, park, wait in reception for 15 minutes, then get put in an exam room, wait in the exam room for a doctor for 10 to 15 minutes, and the doctor comes in, speaks to you for about 5 to 10 minutes, and then you drive 20 minutes to the pharmacy.
Our grandkids are not gonna believe that that was the way that we got primary care, and it is not gonna be the case moving forward. It's just not. We, you know, we've been thinking about this for a while, we were experimenting with a business that we call Amazon Care, which was telemedicine. And we could not believe how much customers liked that customer experience. It turned out that we had the wrong business model for it, which is why we didn't see it moving forward and shut it down. The Amazon Care experience really opened our eyes to the fact that the experience was not gonna was not just gonna change over time, but that people wanted it to change now. We came across this company in One Medical who we were just so impressed with.
You know, if you look at how strong and how easy to use their digital app is with all of your healthcare information readily available in the app. If you wanna have a chat with a medical practitioner, you can easily do so. If you wanna have a video conference with a medical practitioner, you can do so. If you need to come in and see somebody, One Medical has clinics all over the country. You can do so same day or next day, very quickly. All the One Medical physical presences have relationships with health service providers in cities, so if you need to see a specialist, you can do so very quickly.
Then whatever medication you need, you can use Amazon Pharmacy or another third-party pharmacy if you like, to get that quickly without having to travel 20 minutes back and forth to the pharmacy. That's a very different experience, and that's why we became so excited about One Medical and decided to acquire the company. I think that we believe together in Amazon and One Medical together, that we have a chance to meaningfully change the customer experience for so many customers in what they experience every day with healthcare, and we're very excited about that. As that concludes our Q&A, I just wanna thank everyone again for joining us today, particularly our long-term shareholders. We appreciate your support and your interest in what we're doing. It means a lot, and we appreciate it.
Rest assured we're gonna continue doing our part, inventing and taking care of our customers, employees, and communities to make their lives better and easier. Thank you.