Amazon has been my favorite store (and website) for nearly a decade.

As I’ve said many times before, they are the greatest store known to man. They have saved me thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of time spent shopping. They do unto customers as they would do unto themselves. They are my movie store. My book store. My music store that auto syncs with iTunes. They are a treasure trove of user data, helping me reach for products that are consumer approved and well rated so I get burned less often. They ship free and often return free.

Plus it’s just fun getting brown cardboard boxes wrapped up in shipping tape. Heck, their boxes even have a smile on them. For that, I unabashedly love Amazon.

And then they go and do something like this, as if I needed any more reason to shout my love for them from the rooftops with free word of mouth advertising:

1. The give me free swim trunks. I bought some swim trunks last month that didn’t fit. I went to print the free return label, and get the following message. “As a loyal Amazon customer, go ahead and keep the shorts. We’ll still refund your money.” They obviously only do this with select, small margin items where it doesn’t make economic sense to ship and return items free both ways. But they still could have saved or made a few bucks by accepting the return and selling the shorts to someone else. Instead they chose to wow me and did. (PS—Anyone want a boxy pair of swim trunks?)
2. They let me auto-rip songs for free that I bought years ago. Just today I got the following email from Amazon. “Hi Blake. We just wanted you to know that the Justice vinyl record you bought in 2008 is now available for free rip, stream, and download from your cloud player.” You had me at “Hello,” Amazon. You had me at “Hello.”
3. My ebooks all sync to the furthest read page. I still buy paperbacks because they’re often half the price of Kindle editions. And I still can’t share Kindle books with friends and family. But I still buy a lot of Kindle books, too, such as these good reads. And when I do, I can read them on my Kindle, then pick up exactly where I left off on my iPhone (say when I’m on the toilette and don’t have my kindle nearby.) Awesome sauce. PSS—I was really wrong when I wrote this.
4. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, personally read my book pitch and liked it enough to forward to his head of publishing. Quite a validating referral, if you ask me. Even if the editor passed on my book. Either way, Mr. Bezos, you sir are a gentleman and a helluva a businessman—not unlike your more popular West Coast contemporaries. And I still plan on selling my book at your store.

Love,

Your #1 customer.

See also: Is the demise of brick and mortar stores really such a bad thing?