The first quarter of 2020 was an especially successful one for e-commerce giant Amazon, as it revealed this week that sales rose by just over a quarter during this period compared with the same three-month window last year.

This means that it managed to sell goods worth $75.5 billion via safe shopping online worldwide, which is actually higher than its own target.

Interestingly enough, it is not the effect of the ongoing pandemic which is the cause of this uptick in sales, since like many retailers the upshot of having to overhaul its operations to cope with the challenges involved with staying open during the COVID-19 crisis has actually cost Amazon a lot of cash.

Hiring hundreds of thousands of new employees to staff its distribution centres has also bitten into the firm’s profits, accompanied by the pay increase that it has rolled out across the board, partly in response to criticism levelled against it in relation to working conditions.

Company chief executive and founder Jeff Bezos said that Amazon will be taking the vast majority of its profits over the coming quarter and ploughing them back into providing all the protection that workers need to avoid unnecessary exposure to the infectious virus as they continue to provide a vital service during this unprecedented time of disruption.

No doubt similar tales will be told by other major retailers as they reveal the trajectories that their sales and expenditures have taken in the first few months of the year. Some took even more drastic action than Amazon, limiting or even entirely suspending their online sales until such a time as they felt able to operate at an adequate capacity in a way that also did not put employees at risk, which could be a reputational asset.