Stop for a minute and think of the sheer brilliance of last week’s Prime Day. It’s become a thing now, a big multibillion-dollar worldwide two-day event — Black Friday with no lines!

And like the iPod, the iPhone and online shopping in general, it’s one of those things you never knew you needed or even wanted. It represents the American entrepreneurial spirit at its best: ambitious, untethered and unaccepting of the status quo.

While Amazon didn’t release sales figures for last week’s bonanza, it did say it sold more than 175 million items worldwide — by far the most since starting this massive event just five years ago.

And while Prime Day is a megawin for Amazon, Prime members also bought more than $2 billion worth of products from small and mid-sized independent companies on the Amazon platform. So it was a big boon to small companies, as well.

What’s the point to all of this gargantuan effort? The key for Amazon, of course, is to gain new Prime members, who pay a fee of $119 per year (students pay $59). For that they get free two-day shipping and special pricing on items, along with the Prime Video and Prime Music streaming services.

Plus, Taylor Swift headlined the Amazon Music-sponsored Prime Day Concert, offered free to members and watched by millions around the world.

In an added benefit, if Prime members spent $10 at Amazon-owned Whole Foods, they received a $10 credit for use on Prime Day. Amazon even demonstrated that it values people’s personal data by offering a $10 credit to those Amazon Assistant users who permitted it to track their shopping data for price comparison purposes.

Much has been said about how “Seinfeld” was “a show about nothing.” Jeff Bezos and Amazon created their largest shopping day of the year out of “nothing” by giving members hot deals in the middle of July.

Now that’s pure, raw entrepreneurial genius.