Take note: The New York Times reports on a historic moment: during the twelve months ending June 2021, Amazon finally outsold Walmart: $610 billion versus $566 billion.
Okay, let’s not get carried away: the period includes pandemic months during which consumers show a heavy preference for e-commerce over traditional distribution; the two rivals’ operating territories do not overlap; the figure excludes turnover in China (unrepresentative in both cases); and sales are calculated differently (direct in Walmart’s case, indirect and estimated in Amazon’s). But the figures are there, Walmart is the benchmark for the United States, while Amazon, the largest online retailer, sold more, reflecting a change of era that has been a long time coming.
Walmart is not to be taken lightly: in addition to being the world’s largest company by revenue, it operates in 23 countries in addition to all U.S. states, is the world’s largest private employer with 2.2 million people on staff, and continues to make acquisitions and plan developments to keep ahead of the curve. But Amazon’s growth goes far beyond simply expanding its business, and it is convincing consumers to change their habits, and which is spreading to more and more product categories. In many ways, we are talking about something similar to what happened in the 1990s, when Walmart overtook another U.S. institution, Sears, and after doing so, continued to another historic American retailer expand and open thousands of stores, acquiring competitors all over the world in the process.
It now seems that history is repeating itself: Amazon, playing by different rules, has managed to overtake Walmart in a category in which the retail giant was not originally present, but which has become the fastest growing: online shopping. During the pandemic, both Walmart and Amazon increased their sales and investment, but the effort made by the former, which saw its turnover increase by $24 billion last year, was no match for the 200 billion plus growth of the latter, which also added hundreds of new stores and hired more than half a million workers.
And just as happened with Walmart, whose pricing policies put it under investigation in the 1990s and was criticized for the treatment of its workers or its impact on small businesses and local economies, Amazon is now the giant that everyone believes needs to be brought under control, along with a founder who, in addition to being the richest man in the world, believes he is untouchable and is not afraid to try to recuse public officials he deems unsuitable, or sue the U.S. government if it awards a cloud computing or space exploration contract to any other competitor.
A historic milestone? At this point, it is simply confirmation of a trend a long time in the making. You might even have thought this milestone was long overdue. But for someone who writes about the impact of technology on society, it’s still interesting and worth noting.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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