Amazon Has Best-Ever Holiday Season As Traditional Retail Stays Lukewarm

If every recipient of a KitchenAid Mixer sold on Amazon since Nov. 1 decided to bake cookies at the same time, they would make around 7.5 million cookies at once.

The takeaway here isn’t that the world is in desperate need of more cookies (although, generally speaking, it couldn’t hurt), but that Amazon had a fantastic holiday shopping season. Its “best-ever,” according to a company release, with more than one billion items shipped around the globe. (The company declined to share more detailed sales figures with The Huffington Post.)

Other interesting highlights from the report include:

• More than 72 percent of Amazon customers shopped on their mobile devices this holiday season. On Cyber Monday, shoppers bought around 46 electronics devices and 36 toys per second via their smartphones and tablets.
• If you lined up all the 4k TVs Amazon sold this holiday season, they would stretch from the bottom of Mount Everest to the top, nine times over.
• The company sold enough copies of the complete “Harry Potter” movies that, if played consecutively, they would play for more than 300 years.
• Denim ain’t dead: Amazon delivered enough men’s jeans to fill up an Olympic-sized swimming pool ― approximately 90,000 cubic feet of jeans, assuming pool dimensions of 50 meters long, 25 meters wide, and two meters deep.
• Customers purchased 2.5 million watches, or about one watch every one and a half seconds throughout the holiday season.

As Amazon churned out more sales than ever, traditional retail was relatively stagnant, according to Bloomberg Gadfly columnist Shelly Banjo. Banjo says the temperature of U.S. holiday retail sales was “lukewarm” this year, despite high consumer confidence scores:

Amazon’s best-selling products were the Echo and Echo Dot, its voice-activated digital assistants that can read recipes, play music and perform tasks like turning lights on and off.

The most-requested drink recipes via Amazon’s digital assistant “Alexa” were Tom Collins and Manhattans, while the most-requested food tips concerned turkey, prime rib and chocolate chip cookies.