Amazon, once a company with a volatile profit capacity, has started stabilizing its money-making activity in recent years. It’s shown investors that it can turn out huge gains when it wants to, due to its more capable logistics network, Prime subscription service, cloud computing efforts, and growing family of Kindle and Echo devices. This past quarter, unfortunately, was the company’s first disappointment in quite some time. The culprit appears to be Amazon’s retail operating expenses, which swallowed almost the entirety of its income.

The company reported its third quarter earnings for fiscal 2016 today, posting a profit of $252 million, or 59 cents a share, on revenue of $32.7 billion. While both those figures are way up from last…

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