"There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time"
About this Quote
The quote works by recasting consumption as a logistical problem. Shopping is no longer framed as browsing, leisure, or public life; it becomes friction, a task to be optimized. Once Bezos defines the problem that way, online retail appears not as one option among many, but as the obvious solution. "Save people time" is the key phrase. Time, especially in late-capitalist culture, is treated as the most scarce and morally charged resource. If a service gives time back, it acquires the aura of necessity.
There is also a quiet universalizing move in "a whole bunch of people". Bezos is speaking in the folksy idiom of mass demand, flattening differences in class, habit, and desire into a broad consumer bloc. That lets Amazon's growth story present itself as responsiveness rather than domination. The subtext is: we are not training people to live differently; we are simply helping them do what they already need to do.
That rhetorical move mattered in the early rise of e-commerce. It softened the reality that online shopping was not just saving time. It was reorganizing retail, labor, attention, and everyday life around speed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
|---|---|
| Source | "Your World" with Neil Cavuto, www.foxnews.com. November 7, 2002. |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Bezos, Jeff. (2026, March 25). There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-a-whole-bunch-of-people-who-dont-like-186432/
Chicago Style
Bezos, Jeff. "There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time." FixQuotes. March 25, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-a-whole-bunch-of-people-who-dont-like-186432/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time." FixQuotes, 25 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-a-whole-bunch-of-people-who-dont-like-186432/. Accessed 27 Mar. 2026.



