[bsanr]

It goes beyond that. Did everyone forget mail-order catalogs? Even up into my early teens, we would regularly receive them. One could mail-in (or phone-in) orders for a similar variety of goods as is available on Amazon (relative to the number of goods generally available in the American market). I understand that they're still common for enterprise, if for little else as marketing. Amazon's advantage over those is not so large, and the caveats involved in using it make me wonder about the net utility - especially now, as the politicians whose Amazon's success has enabled have badly damaged our postal system and drastically slowed the delivery of goods not available at a local distribution center.