Amazon doesn't put profit first The company is madly adding such customer freebies as new movies and television shows to its Netflix-slaying Prime Instant Video program, and its commitment to having the lowest price anywhere is increasingly exerting a gravitational effect on the strategies of rivals. Free cash flow is cash from operations minus capital expenditures, or what's left over after spending on warehouses, conveyor belts, robots and data centers for its cloud computing business. Bezos is more concerned with cash flow than making money because he believes the opportunity offered by the Internet, and by e-commerce, is huge and largely untapped. [...] he's prepared to cut prices to the bone and add all those freebies to cultivate customer loyalty and increase sales. Investors, comforted by Bezos' consistency with this strategy over the years, have so much faith in him that they're willing to tolerate razor-thin or nonexistent profit in exchange for continued market share gains and a promise of windfall profit someday. The new fulfillment centers, operating outside such major American cities as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, could serve as the centers of a hub-and-spoke logistics network that will allow Amazon to store perishables like fresh fruit. [...] when Amazon owns a network of vans humming around most major urban centers to deliver groceries, it will be able to pack items such as the most popular DVDs and books and deliver them to customers within 24 hours after they are ordered, just as it does now in Seattle.