1997 "Lee Scott, the future Walmart CEO who was then running logistics told Dalzell (who Amazon was hiring) that Amazon was a novel idea but that it had limited potential. Don Soderquist, Walmart's COO, said that because Amazon didn't store its own iventory--at the time, it just ordered it from distributors and then quickly shipped it back out-- the model would hit a wall once it got to $100M in sales.

(from "The Everything Store" Bezzos' biography)