The company was founded in 1994, spurred by what Bezos called his "regret minimization framework", which he described as his effort to fend off regret for not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush.[8] The company began as an online bookstore.[9] While the largest brick-and-mortar bookstores and mail-order catalogs might offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could sell far more. Bezos wanted a name for his company that began with "A" so that it would appear early in alphabetic order.[7] He began looking through the dictionary and settled on "Amazon" because it was a place that was "exotic and different" and it was the river he considered the biggest in the world, as he hoped his company would be.[7] Since 2000, Amazon's logotype is an arrow leading from A to Z, representing customer satisfaction (as it forms a smile). A goal was to have every product in the alphabet.[10] Amazon was incorporated in 1994, in the state of Washington. In July 1995, the company began service and sold