What can small businesses learn from the largest online retailer? While the company was still growing, Amazon, like Walmart before it, focused on building a strong foundation. It paid little attention to stock price, and funneled almost all its profits back into the business, willing to operate at razor thin margins in the name of customer acquisition. The founder was obsessed with growing smartly and thinking big, not "We have all the customers we could possibly want". Real Estate isn't in and of itself isn't valuable, it's just a valueless piece of dirt. It's what smart people do with it. That's why Amazon just opened their new store on what was in 2018 the "future of Sears" in Oak Brook.
Eddie the stupid k–led the golden goose built by smart people, thinking all the golden eggs (the billions in positive cash flow he inherited) were inside, but the real estate was never the golden goose in the first place. Now all he has is a dead goose chopped into pieces collectively worth far less than what he bought, when he could've had baby geese laying even more eggs. This is why fellow CEOs named him the worst CEO in American history.