In 1997, the BBC asked Jeff Bezos when internet shopping would take off

Earlier this year, Amazon reported $143.3 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2024. But 27 years ago, the BBC wondered when predictions that the internet revolutionizing shopping would come true, speaking to local bakers, booksellers, and even Jeff Bezos to find out.

The Money Programme report, which originally aired in November of 1997, was recently added to the BBC Archive YouTube Channel. In it, reporter Nils Blythe takes a simulated journey on the information superhighway — complete with wonderfully dated ‘90s-era blue screen effects and graphics — and speaks to retailers who had varying levels of success with online commerce at the time.

Those included a small bakery in the UK that was enjoying several thousands of dollars in sales every year selling its baked goods internationally, and the British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s that was having middling success selling groceries using the internet, phones, and even faxes.

Blythe also spoke with Jeff Bezos who had launched Amazon.com as an online book retailer just two years prior. Bezos bragged that Amazon’s catalog of over 2.5 million books was ten times more than the largest brick-and-mortar book stores were able to stock, and predicted that “over some large number of years... internet book selling is going to become a very large business.” He was mostly correct, four years before Amazon turned a profit for the first time.