Mr. Chapman had purchased a set of extremely bright LED light bulbs from Amazon — lights “designed for off-road SUV driving at night” — and mounted them to the ceiling of his home office, illuminating his indoor space to nearly the brightness of the outdoors. Light bulbs this bright would have been prohibitively expensive not long ago, but (thanks to environmental rules Donald Trump wants to do away with) energy-efficient LEDs have revolutionized indoor lighting, and Amazon has become a thriving marketplace for the new bulbs. On Amazon, Mr. Chapman had spotted a product opportunity not apparent to the market — thanks to cheap, widely available LEDs, it’s now possible to illuminate indoor spaces to a level so bright that it can reduce wintertime blues.

Naturally, I had to try it out. And so, over the holidays, I spent a couple hundred dollars buying loads of different very-bright LEDs from Amazon. Alas, the result was not too exciting: I got my office as bright as the sun, but after a few weeks of sitting in the glare, I noticed at best a minimal improvement in my mood.

Which brings me to the really amazing part: After using the lights for a couple of weeks, I packed them up and sent them back. Amazon is a trillion-dollar retailing phenomenon that has transformed almost everything about the way Americans shop, but sometimes it seems to operate as a charitable operation for well-off consumers who just want to try out this or that high-priced consumer fancy.

Consider all the resources Amazon put into my lighting purchase: The company had stocked its store with niche, highly-advanced electronics; it had spent billions on a shopping infrastructure capable of shipping those products to me overnight; and it had spent heavily on marketing, including doling out affiliate marketing fees to bloggers like Mr. Chapman, in order to bring customers like me to its store.

Yet, after all that, I’d decided to use the company essentially as a kind of product lending library. I purchased a variety of expensive items I had only marginal interest in keeping for the long-term, I’d opened the boxes and got my sticky hands all over them, and when I grew tired of them, I sent them back like so much used laundry.

How much had the company made on me? Not a penny — at least, not that time. Which, of course, is the bet: The more absurdly convenient Amazon is to me, the more likely I will be to spend more of my money there next time. And to balk, it hopes, when the next president floats a plan to break apart the everything store.

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