Bezos de-Boobed

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mamazon.html

I’m not certain whence the idea about Jeff Bezos naming Amazon.com because he views the internet as “a great river of commerce”. A former high-up amazon staffer, q.v. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/misc/dr.html/002-4620352-8272052, informed me that the answer was much more simple. Bezos wanted a good name that would come at the beginning of an alphabetized list. Similar reasons for company names abound. My favorite example is a family in Long Island where the father owned a trucking company and then his sons and brother started their own firms. They went through something like twenty names between them, with the winner finally sticking a meaningless “AAA” at the beginning of his.

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For some reason skip firms in the UK are very into the same practice; I saw an ‘Aasvogal’ written on one I passed the other day.

Anyway, that’s not why I posted. I really wanted to congratulate bibliophage on a really excellent, comprehensive answer. (I liked the jugs joke too.)

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If you really want to see this phenomenon in action, go look under “Bail Bonds” in any big city’s Yellow Pages.

It’s like the Vegas Strip of telephone directories, and all of them have between 1 and 3 As stuck in front of the name.