Just as Engadget was hitting publish on its first posts, I was putting a freshly minted English degree to use working at an indie bookshop in Los Angeles. In seemingly unrelated news, Amazon had just reported its first profitable year after switching from selling books to selling “everything” four years before. (It still sold a lot of books.)

Our bookstore did a good job keeping shelves stocked with a balance of the more worthy popular hits and smaller, better fare. But we couldn’t have every book a customer might want, so we offered to order any in-print title. If a distributor had it, it’d take about a week to get in, longer if we had to go through the publisher. That seemed fine for most customers.

But sometimes “about a week” was too long. A few people came right out and said, “Nah, I’ll order it on Amazon.” In 2005, Amazon launched Prime, the membership program that, for $79 a year, gave customers unlimited two-day shipping on most orders. At launch, CEO Jeff Bezos called it “‘all-you-can-eat’ express shipping.” No one knew at the time how hungry the world was for Amazon’s brand of convenience. And now, nearly two decades later, we’ve seen the shifts that accommodate that buffet — in labor, retail and the entire customer experience.

Prime wasn’t an overnight success. It’s estimated that six years after launch, just four million households paid for the service. But 10 years later, in 2021, Bezos claimed it had accrued 200 million members worldwide. Outside of that milestone, Amazon hasn’t made its membership numbers public, but it’s likely the figure is higher now.

That shipping should be both free and fast has become an expectation, and no company has done more to alter the landscape of logistics than Amazon. On its own, the company operates over a hundred warehouses in the US, each ranging from 600,000 to four million square feet. Each one employs between 1,000 and 1,500 people, and an army of around 750,000 robots works alongside humans in many locations.

The company operates a fleet of cargo planes, is experimenting with drone deliveries and deploys thousands of delivery vans — though none of those Amazon-branded vans are driven by actual employees. Rather, separate companies, known as delivery service partners (DSP), subcontract drivers to operate those vans. Amazon employs 1.5 million people either full or part time (with one million in the US), but those figures don’t include independent contractors and temporary personnel. In addition to the DSP program, Amazon Flex lets individuals use their own cars to deliver smile-emblazoned packages to porches. The company outsources delivery to traditional providers too, relying on both UPS and the US Postal Service, the latter it has compelled to deliver packages on Sundays since 2013.

Such vast orchestration to deliver Stanley Quenchers and pimple patches faster than anyone has paid off. However, it’s hard to look at growth and revenue numbers without considering the human costs. Contracted drivers pee in bottles because meeting quotas leaves no time for bathroom breaks. Workers sustain serious injuries at automated warehouses. The company has been sued for retaliatory firing, intrusive employee surveillance practices and failure to follow COVID safety guidelines. Amazon again made the dirty dozen list in 2023 for workplace safety, according to the advocacy group National COSH. And while it has taken steps to improve, with better compensation, the company takes anti-union actions typical of a massive corporation, joining others in calling the National Labor Relations Board “unconstitutional.”

Apart from worker issues, Amazon’s dominance has made life harder for retail businesses in general, particularly the big chains. The Amazon Effect became shorthand for the mall-emptying squeeze of e-commerce on traditional retail. Even businesses that team up with Amazon don’t fare well. Third-party sellers on the site are subject to punitive measures and must contend with increasing fees, which sometimes put them out of business. Sellers who do perform well have seen products copied and sold by Amazon’s private label. Notable partnerships have had dismal results, such as when Borders outsourced its early web sales or the exclusivity deal with Toys ‘R’ Us. Of course, Borders no longer exists, and Toys ‘R’ Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017.

Trying to beat Amazon on speed and price is pointless. Joining them is unwise. So retailers compete in other ways. At the bookstore, we focused on our strengths: a varied, multi-talented staff who could size up a customer’s reading tastes and stick a good book in their hands. If someone came into our store circa 2005 and said they were into fantasy, there’s a good chance our book buyer would pass them a copy of George R.R. Martin’s latest, years before HBO had anything to do with it.

We had a curated ‘zine section and hosted live events with bestselling authors, cult magazine founders and local writers. But mostly, we capitalized on folks who wanted something more from their shopping experience than just speed and convenience, people who didn’t mind if it took a week to get a book, as long as it came with a little local community. Some just wanted to browse books while sitting under the tree (there’s a tree in the middle of the store), petting a cat (in my day, that was Lucy) and listening to what we felt were pretty wicked playlists.

Today, Skylight Books is still a force of creativity and verve in the Los Feliz neighborhood, and it has even expanded into an annex next door. In general, after the initial casualties from the retail apocalypse and COVID, independent bookstores are doing OK, with established names staying put and new stores opening. Elsewhere in the retail industry, big chains continue to close locations, but independent retail seems to be growing. Personally, I enjoy the new bakeries, brewpubs and bulk stores that have sprung up around the neighborhoods where I now live.

I can’t, as a commerce writer, ignore that a decent portion of my job directs readers to Amazon’s website. The company is playing a part in displaying the very words you’re reading, as Engadget’s site is facilitated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) through Yahoo’s cloud partnership. The company is one of the biggest on the planet, the second largest employer in the US and a good portion of every retail dollar spent in the US goes into Amazon’s revenue chest.

With its acquisition of Whole Foods’ 500+ stores, Amazon is doing fine in the physical retail sector. Yet the company doesn’t tend to win when it tries to fabricate other retail experiences. Amazon Books, Amazon Style and Amazon 4-Star were all small-scale retail spaces that tried to leverage Amazon’s brand, massive trove of buyer data and cutting-edge retail technology. At their peak, those stores comprised about 70 brick-and-mortar locations, all of which are now closed. The cashierless Amazon Go still has more than 20 locations in the US, but Amazon shut down nine of them in 2023 and hasn’t announced plans to open more.

Those misfires could be statistically inevitable; more than half of new businesses go under before they hit the 10-year mark. But perhaps those stores failed because, as physical spaces, they couldn’t capitalize on Amazon’s primary strength: zero-effort buying. Shopping at Amazon.com isn’t particularly pleasant. The website is cluttered and confusing. Suspect products and fake reviews erode shoppers’ trust. It isn’t even the cheapest place to shop. But that 1-Click™ buy button and turbo delivery makes stuff appear on our doorsteps like it slid there on greased rails.

Yet when people get up the energy to leave their homes, they may hope for more: human experiences created by people from their own neighborhoods who do what they do out of passion, not because market data indicates dollars to be had in a given sector. With its trillion-dollar valuation, Amazon isn’t going anywhere, but under its massive shadow, there’s still room for businesses that focus on the human element of commercial transactions, places where people might want to spend some of the time Amazon’s speed and convenience may have saved them.

To celebrate Engadget's 20th anniversary, we're taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.

The Anker Nebula Solar HD portable projector is on sale at Amazon for $250. That matches a previous low and represents a 46 percent discount off the current $460 list price. Wshen it first came out in 2021, it went for $600. We give the Nebula Solar a shout out in our buyer's guide to projectors as a notable budget option, noting that you get a lot of features for the price. 

It's a 1080p HD projector that emits 400 lumens for reasonably bright outdoor use. The battery is included, which isn't always the case with portable projectors, so that's another relevant savings. You'll get up to three hours of play from a charge (depending on how bright you set the output) and sound comes courtesy of dual three-watt speakers with support for Dolby Digital Plus. 

Android TV is preloaded and the projector is Wi-Fi enabled to access that content. You can also connect via HDMI, USB or Bluetooth, and it can mirror content from your phone using Miracast. Since it's a projector, the screen size depends on how far away you place it from the wall or other projection surface. This one can deliver up to 120 inches of movie or TV visuals and has a built-in stand to help you adjust the angle. 

Of course, as a portable projector, the Nebula Solar isn't going to be as bright as its corded cousins, but if you want to try out watching a movie under the stars once the weather warms up, this is a pretty inexpensive way to do it. 

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The Marshall Middleton Bluetooth speaker has a list price of $300, but right now Amazon is selling it for $236. That's a 21 percent discount and the lowest price we've tracked since it's launch last March, beating the former low of $260 it hit last December. It's also on sale for $250 at B&H Photo. We named the Middleton one of the best mid-range ($200 to $400) Bluetooth speakers you can buy in our guide. It combines good sound quality with a IP67 rating, meaning it's dust-tight and can survive a dip in a meter of water for up to 30 minutes. Plus there's a handy carry strap to drag it around.   

Marshall markets the Middleton as their flagship Bluetooth speaker — and the company's largest portable with a waterproof rating. At four pounds, it's still small enough to toss in a backpack, but large enough to house three battery cells adding up to 9,600mAh of charge to enable a 20-hour run time. You can even siphon off some of that juice to charge a phone thorough the USB-C port. 

It puts out 360-degree sound from two 15-watt woofers, two 10-watt tweeters and a pair of passive radiators. We found the output to be respectable, handling low frequencies well. Marshall's sound tends to have a good dynamic range combined with significant depth, and that's what you get here. 

The Middleton is also the biggest model to support Stack Mode which lets you pair up with another Middleton or the smaller Emberton II or Willen. Pairing happens using the app and double pressing the speakers' Bluetooth buttons.  

Speaking of other music boxes, the Emberton II speaker, which we named one of the best picks under $200 in that same speaker guide, is also on sale. It's 21 percent off and down to $134, which isn't an all-time low — it went for $14 less last Black Friday. It's not the loudest speaker in it's size range, but the sound is pleasantly balanced and a good accompaniment to small gatherings. 

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Woot is selling Amazon's largest tablet, the Fire Max 11 for $140. That's $89 below the list price and $37 cheaper than it's selling for on Amazon right now. The price applies to the 64GB model with ads on the lockscreen and just the tablet alone — the magnetic case, stylus and keyboard case are all sold separately. The tablet hit $150 for the shopping holidays last year, so the Woot deal represents a $10 discount off the all-time low price. The sale should run through Sunday or until the tablet sells out. 

We had a chance to briefly check out a sample when the latest generation came out in May of last year and were impressed by how much you get for the money. There's an 11-inch LCD screen (Amazon's largest tablet screen) with a 2,000 x 1,000 resolution. Most of Amazon's Fire Tablets are built for casual use like browsing, streaming and for kids to play games on, but the Max 11 could be seen as the grown-up of the lineup. It's designed to handle a bit of work and multitasking with its octa-core MediaTek processor that Amazon says is 50 percent faster than the next fastest model. Just keep in mind that Fire Tablets rely on the Amazon Appstore, which does have Microsoft 365 apps, but you can't natively get Google's productivity apps without sideloading.  

Still, you get an aluminum build, support for Wi-Fi 6, 8-megapixel front and rear cameras, a fingerprint sensor and picture-in-picture capabilities. That last feature could be particularly useful for keeping tabs on your Alexa-enabled smart home cameras while you watch a show or flip through YouTube. In fact, when set up with a stand, it can go into "show mode" and act like one of Amazon's smart displays, providing you with Alexa's controls and interactivity. 

Even though it's perfectly suitable for adults who want to get some work done, Fire Max 11's claimed 14-hour battery life, comprehensive parental controls and access to an Amazon Kids+ subscription (currently $5 monthly) makes the tablet particularly well-suited for kids, too. Plus Amazon says the Max 11 is "three times as durable as the iPad 10.9 (10th generation)."  

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If you work over public Wi-Fi, need to access geo-restricted content or just want to add an extra layer of privacy to your internet connection, you may want to use a VPN service. NordVPN is one of the most popular providers out there and right now, a digital code giving you a year of access to NordVPN Plus is going for $55 at Amazon. The plan also throws in one of our top password managers, NordPass. For comparison, right now a year of the Plus service is $72 directly from Nord. Of course, the best deals the company offers is on its two-year plans. Right now two years of the Plus service is $60 from Nord — so you're still saving $5 with Amazon's deal, plus you're not locked into a full two-year commitment. 

If you just want the VPN coverage without the password manager, you can get the standard service. It's $45 for a year of access, a savings of $15 over buying from Nord directly. And if you're just interested in the password manager, two-years of NordPass is down to $35, which is $5 less than going through Nord's site. 

We named Nord's password manager one of the best for cross-platform use in our guide to those services. The service keeps your credentials safe while making it easy to access your vault from whichever device or operating system you happen to be on. It also allows for biometric sign ins, making it even easier to get at your saved passwords. 

As for Nord's VPN, like all such services, it masks your IP address and encrypts your data to and from its destination. It also blocks your ISP from seeing data about your browsing. Just keep in mind that VPNs can't protect against other security risks like phishing and identity theft. Nord's VPN service didn't make the cut in our testing of such services, partly because we thought the price was a bit too high for the features provided. This deal removes some of the hesitation and we did find the service to be speedy and like that it's based on WireGuard, one of the more secure protocols. But the lack of open source software for most of its products and a less-than-stellar record of customer data privacy prevents it from being the best we can recommend. The service that did top our list was ProtonVPN. It's currently $72 for one year of the service alone. A bundle that includes a password manager, email and other services is currently $120 for the year. 

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The Google Nest Wi-Fi Pro, which we named the best pick for people new to mesh Wi-Fi systems, is on sale for $220 for the two-pack. That's a 27 percent discount, which is the best price it's been all year and just $20 more than the all time low it hit for Black Friday last November. The set of two should provide coverage for 4,400 square feet. If you've got a particularly large home or tricky areas due to thick walls or other interference, you might want the three-pack. That set is down to $319 after a 20 percent discount.

Mesh Wi-Fi systems let you add a distributed set of smaller nodes around your home, solving a lot of connectivity problems including sub-par ISP-provided equipment and dead zones in far off or awkward corners. The Wi-Fi 7 standard was just released, but few devices support it just yet, and the speeds the protocol can potentially deliver (along with the price tag) are likely overkill for the average household. Wi-Fi 6E, on the other hand, is mature and much more affordable. It's plenty capable of giving a home superior wireless performance for those coming from prior Wi-Fi generations. 

In our review, Engadget's Daniel Cooper noted that the Nest Pro system is neither faster (though it's plenty fast) nor more customizable than its competitors, but its one of the more affordable Wi-Fi 6E systems out there. It's also terribly simple to use, even for those who've never worked with mesh routers before. The Nest Pro should particularly appeal to anyone who has already bought into Google's smart home ecosystem, as it makes good use of the Home app, where many of your automated controls may already be living.

One of the bigger selling points is Google's promise of regular software updates, which means you should be able to set the system up and not have to think about your Wi-Fi configurations for several years. 

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The end of another week is upon us, which means it's time for another round up of the best deals on some of the tech we've tested and recommend. A few discounts are still around from last week's President's Day sale, and new savings have popped up as well. If you're in the market for Apple gadgets, quite a few are seeing decent discounts, including the iPad Mini, iPad Air and the 15-inch MacBook Air. Multiple Anker charging accessories are on sale, as are a few of our favorite Logitech peripherals. We got an exclusive $30 discount from Thermoworks on their popular instant-read thermometer, and 8BitDo's Famicom-inspired keyboard is 20 percent off at Woot. Here are the best deals from this week that you can still get today.

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We often recommend Logitech gear in our guides and right now, a number of the brand's keyboards, webcams and mice are discounted up to 25 percent. The sale puts the Pebble 2 Combo keyboard and mouse at $50, which is $10 off and matches its all time low. You can get the deal from Amazon or directly from Logitech. The Pebble mouse is the newer model of a recommendation in our guide to productivity mice and the keyboard is the next generation of a callout from our MacBook accessories article. Both Bluetooth accessories are compact, portable and quickly swap between devices with a button press. Plus this new generation is made from around 50 percent recycled plastic. 

Elsewhere in the Logitech sale, the Brio 301 webcam is down to $45, which is a 25 percent discount and matches the low it hit a few times over the past few months. We named it a less-expensive alternative to our overall pick in our guide to webcams. It shoots 1080p video, has a noise cancelling mic and uses auto light correction to make up for a dimly lit room. It doesn't support HDR or have an adjustable field of view, but at just $45, it offers a lot of features at a low price. 

The Signature M650 mouse, which we recommend in our gift guide, is down to $35 (instead of the $40 list price) for a few different configurations, including a left-handed version. Logitech is running the same sale price. The mouse is lightweight, made from recycled materials, and has a SmartWheel that lets you swap between precision and super fast scrolling, depending on what you're working on. And it'll run for two years on a single AA battery.  

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We named the Sonos Era 100 the best midrange option in our guide to smart speakers and right now, Woot is selling a two-pack for $410. That amounts to an 18 percent discount or $88 less than buying them at full price from Sonos. This isn't the lowest price we've seen — that happened during Black Friday last year, when a single unit sold for $199 directly from Sonos. Still, if you want a smart speaker capable of delivering good audio, the deal is worth considering as Sonos speakers aren't often on sale. 

The Sonos Era 100 earned an 88 in our review, with Engadget's Nathan Ingraham calling it "affordable multi-room audio that actually sounds good." This is the replacement for the popular Sonos One and improves upon its predecessor in both sound quality and features. It has a new speaker array with two tweeters and a larger woofer. Combined, the improvements add up to better clarity and impressive bass. 

The Era 100 can now tune itself based on where you put the speaker thanks to the built-in mics (previously you had to manually optimize it using your phone). Unlike the Sonos One, this generation does have line-in capabilities, but you'll need an adapter to hook up a turntable. The multi-room audio feature is simple to set up, as is pairing the speakers to work in stereo — that means if you go for this offer, it'll be easy to get the most out of the set.  

As a smart speaker, Alexa comes standard so you can get help with questions, smart home control and other tasks like setting reminders or managing your smart home devices. There's also the Sonos assistant, which lets you control your music just by asking. Unfortunately, the Google Assistant is no longer supported through Sonos speakers. The Era 100 does support Apple AirPlay 2, but you'll need to access Siri through your phone, not the speaker. 

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We've spent another week keeping an eye on the worthwhile tech deals out there. Unfortunately, if you're looking for a discount on the brand new Apple Vision Pro, those headsets are firmly sticking to their $3,499 price tag. But plenty of other devices that we've tested and recommend are on sale this week. Anker accessories, including two of our favorite power banks, the Prime and the Nano are on sale. A few different retailers are offering a $400 discount on the Google Pixel Fold. And our favorite Bluetooth trackers for iPhone users are just $79 for a four-pack. If you do pony up for Apple's spatial computing wonder, note that the compatible AirPods Pro are still within a dollar of their all time low. Here are the best deals from this week that you can still get today. 

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