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: 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.
