In the earliest days at amazon, we had a customer who had placed an order for several books. One of the books was no longer available, and when we notified the customer, they wanted to replace it with a different book that cost more than the original. They had paid by check (!) for the original order, but wanted to use a credit card to pay the difference.

Myself and the other founding programmer groaned - our system was not designed to have multiple payments via different payment systems for a single order, nor to handle cases of a partial payment that did not correspond to the value of an entire order.

Bezos said "this just has to work for the customer, we have to tell them "sure, no problem", today, tomorrow and forever".

I'm not proud of what Amazon has done or become, and there is much to criticize or even protest about. But this level of committment to customer service, to whatever extent it has actually survived the last 30 years - that's something that was both eye opening to me and something to be just a tiny bit proud of.