Year-over-year quarterly growth of 44% would be significant for any company, but when the numbers were already this big, it starts to qualify as astonishing.

Amazon's sales of $108.5 billion in the first quarter compared with $75.5 billion a year earlier, setting a new record for the Seattle-based e-commerce giant and providing a glimpse of its strong position as the world emerges from the pandemic. Amazon is easing its spending on COVID-19 initiatives, but consumers' online purchasing habits appear to have permanently changed.

The result: its profits more than tripled, to $8.1 billion, from $2.5 billion a year earlier.

The impact of that structural shift on Amazon's bottom line is the big takeaway from its first-quarter results, released Thursday afternoon.

We break down the quarter on this episode of Day 2, GeekWire's podcast about everything Amazon, with GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook, and former third-party seller Jason Boyce, co-author of "The Amazon Jungle" and founder and CEO of e-commerce agency Avenue7Media.