How e-commerce works in the Amazon rainforest

WHEN YOU behold the Lion of Judah you do not think “e-commerce”. Its lower decks have hooks for 467 hammocks where passengers sleep on the three-day voyage up the Amazon river from Manaus, a city of 2m people, to Uarini, a manioc-growing town. Its upper deck has more hammocks, a bar for sinners and a chapel for saints. Its cargo hold stinks of fish. But when the Amazon’s largest department store, Bemol, started delivering to customers in the rainforest, three-decker passenger boats were its chosen means of transport.

Bemol was founded in 1942 by three grandsons of a Moroccan Jewish immigrant who arrived in Brazil in 1887. It sold fridges and televisions in the traditional way from its megastores in Manaus until 2018, when one of the founders’ grandsons, Denis Minev, took over. He suspected there were hundreds of thousands of customers up and down the Amazon and its tributaries that Bemol wasn’t reaching and decided to go to them.