The Holiday Season Was Very Good to Amazon

Fans of Carrie Fisher, Wham!, and democracy are having a pretty rough holiday, but at least things are going well for one online behemoth. Amazon says it had its best holiday season ever, shipping more than 1 billion items, Reuters reports. Amazon stock went up 1.6% with the news. According to CNN, Amazon says it sold enough TVs to reach the top of Mount Everest nine times, enough KitchenAid mixers to make 7.5 million cookies at the same time, and a watch every 1.5 seconds. Other popular items included Keurig coffee pods, virtual reality headsets, Finding Dory, and Pokemon games.

But Amazon's most popular items were its Echo and Echo Dot. "Despite our best efforts and ramped-up production, we still had trouble keeping them in stock," one Amazon executive says. An expert estimates the online retailer sold up to 5 million of the voice-controlled devices, and USA Today reports it sold nine times more of them than it did last year. Dec. 19 was the busiest shopping day on Amazon, and Dec. 23 was the most popular day for instant Amazon Now deliveries (a lot of people were getting Oreo Cookies, for some reason). Unfortunately, the holidays weren't so rosy for traditional retailers, where performance was described as "lukewarm," according to the Huffington Post. (More Amazon stories.)