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The banana stand near the Spheres on Amazon’s Seattle headquarters campus. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Move over, Oprah. Panos Panay is the new king of daytime giveaways.
“You get a Kindle, and you get a Kindle!” Panay should have barked from inside a banana stand at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters on Monday as the company’s senior vice president of Devices and Services handed out his new baby.
In a video posted on Instagram on Monday, Panay peeled away from his day job and is seen giving away the new Kindle Paperwhite — a $159 item — to employees and members of the public stopping by for a free banana at the trailer located between the Spheres and Amazon’s Day 1 office tower on 7th Avenue.
“What is it?” one woman asked.
“What is it?” Panay replied. “It’s the fastest Kindle we’ve ever shipped. It’s also the thinnest one.”
“This is your first banana at Amazon? That’s so cool,” he said in the video to one new employee. He engaged with another over the Kindle’s sustainable packaging, another over the name of his dog, and another who works on the Kindle team. One guy even bonked his free Kindle off a nearby garbage can.
“Just throw it across the room, it’d be fine,” Panay joked. (Hey, this isn’t the NFL and that’s not a Surface tablet.)
Amazon said Panay staffed the banana stand for 20 minutes. The company called it a surprise giveaway, and said that there are no specific plans for future giveaways at this time, Amazon is “always looking for fun ways to engage with our community.”
Panay, who made a surprise departure from Microsoft more than a year ago to join Amazon, heads up the division that includes the e-readers as well as the Alexa voice assistant, Echo devices, Fire tablets, Zoox self-driving taxis, Eero wireless networking devices, Ring and Blink cameras, Fire TV devices, and Kuiper, the company’s nascent satellite internet business.
And now, bananas.
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