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by joeblau·7y ago·view on hn ↗
I worked at Amazon on a team that built a mobile point of sale application. We had one supplier for our card reader that was this family owned company. It was a super tight night company — They even had a wall of how long employees worked at the company and some were there over 40 years. That being said, we (Amazon) wanted to move to blue tooth card readers. What I heard is that we tried to strong arm them into doing what we wanted even though the company had so many other clients and we weren't a big enough priority for them to drop everything and focus on us. The relationship was so strained that when myself and a few engineers went down to debug something with the hardware team from the other company, we were told to walk on egg shells and be careful about what we said.
1 comments
Kudos to the family owned business.

Amazon is taking a page out of Walmarts playbook. Both are juggernauts and won't fail overall. My hope is they help create new markets in the areas where they do fail.