Success Quote by Jeff Bezos

Bezos frames a cutthroat truth in a folksy binary, then slips Amazon into the morally flattering side. The line is simple enough to sound inevitable: every company is either squeezing you or saving you. That’s the rhetorical trick. He isn’t just promising lower prices; he’s defining virtue as price pressure, and vice as margin hunger, in a way that makes Amazon’s strategy feel like public service.

The subtext is more calculating. “Work to charge less” is not philanthropy; it’s a growth engine. By treating low prices as a north star, Amazon turns consumer goodwill into habit and habit into infrastructure dominance. The sentence quietly swaps the question most businesses ask (How do we maximize profit?) for a different one (How do we make everyone else’s profit impossible?). “We will be the second” reads like a pledge, but it’s also a warning: if your competitor is structurally committed to lower prices, your room to breathe shrinks every quarter.

Context matters: this is a founder-era Amazon credo, born in the late-90s/early-2000s logic of internet scale, where capturing demand early mattered more than harvesting margins now. Low prices required ruthless operational discipline, bargaining power over suppliers, and eventually the flywheel of Prime, logistics, and data. The charm of the quote is that it invites the customer to root for the same machine that later becomes hard to escape. It works because it translates a complicated project - market power through efficiency - into a moral identity: the company that “tries to charge less,” even when the bill shows up somewhere else.