Baloney! The #1 retail company always fallen on it’s face at some point and it’ll happen at some point with Walmart.
How long do you give it?
If you accept my premise Amazon is doomed as well. How long until Amazon starts to crumble?
I agree 100% with the OP. I’m sure that in the 60’s, everyone thought Sears was infalliable. Now, I’m surprised that they are still in business.
All Things Must Pass.
Amazon is surprisingly fragile. Their philosophy has always been to roll over profits into expanding the company. It’s been great for growth but it could leave the company over-expanded and vulnerable if they hit a bad year.
That’s true. But in the past you could at least count on other businesses to step into the void. If McDonalds went bankrupt next week, we’d just go eat at Burger King or Wendy’s.
But some companies have become so big they’ve become de facto monopolies. If they go bankrupt, the entire business might go down with it. Can anybody tell me what the second biggest online retailer is after Amazon?
I looked it up. Ironically, it’s Walmart. Which is about one sixth the size of Amazon.
Business fail for many reasons, but a big one is that the reasons for their existence disappear. Sears didn’t fail, exactly; retail did. It’s not like some other big-box retail chain put Sears out of business (they’re all dying, too), it’s just that that style of store is not so popular in comparison with online and other shopping styles. Sears didn’t adapt fast enough to compete.
I think Amazon will stick around until something replaces the current online shopping model. What, I don’t know. Maybe a drone-aided change in the current distribution center model. But so far I don’t see even minimal signals that this model is going away, so I think Amazon will be around for a while yet.
If really advanced 3D printing–or even better, molecular assembly–takes off, then there’s no reason for an Amazon to exist. A sophisticated physical distribution network is just a pointless waste of capital when everything can be printed on demand. But that’s a long way off.
There’ll be as many drones darkening the skies as once did passenger pigeons.
In theory, a mix of driverless cars and robotic warehouses could remove the need for physical walmarts. But, so long as Walmart as a corporation has the management culture to adapt, they could. They could essentially convert each existing Walmart into a warehouse/robotic distribution hub. Maybe turn the parking lot into a paid RV park. Perhaps the autonomous cars, on their route for a pickup, would actually drive inside the building (they’d switch to pure electric mode as they do so) and loop through the aisles. Robotic loaders would load them with a given order. Then, they would proceed on their way to the customers.
Customers who want a small discount would go to some kind of pickup point on site where their order would be ready.
Yeah, but what about when 3D printers become good enough to work as replicators?
**Play it once, Sam. For old times’ sake. **
Here’s looking at you, kid.
Two opposing thoughts:
- Businesses like Walmart run on a Ponzi-like plan: keep growing and expanding. Eventually, they will have saturated the world and will stop growing. I think businesses need to discover economic “sustainability” instead of only being satisfied with growth.
- Everyday at a big box store, I ask customers if I can help them find something (yes, there are still store employees that do that). Every day, at least one customer tells me “No thanks; I’m just browsing/I haven’t made up my mind/ I’m not sure what I’m looking for.” How will internet shopping work for people like that? If you don’t know for sure what you want, how do you search Amazon for it?
This thread touched on, but doesn’t fully recognize what kind of revolution we are in the midst of right now. I wont claim to have it all worked out either, but I recognize a few things.
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it’s not a simple thing, that brick and mortar stores are in trouble. WHY they are in trouble is an historic phenomenon of sorts. They aren’t in trouble due to bad management for the most part, they are in trouble because of lots of factors, including that for a VERY long time now, lots of people have been propping up and even expanding the cost of land. The price of land SHOULD have fluctuated with the ability of people to buy it, but it has not. Hence the cost of keeping a store running has steadily risen, whether the customer base has been able to afford it or not.
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they are also in trouble because of adaptations by the on line offerings. The ability to return things easily is necessary to make on line shopping work for many products. The willingness of customers to wait for their merchandise to reach them after purchase is necessary too. More than that, what has been undermining the stores, is the increasing willingness of people to buy things sight unseen. In a way, the increasing reliability of products, has undermined retail operations.
I’ve read that the amount of retail space (in square feet) per capita is much higher in the US than in other developed countries. So even if a bunch of malls and big-box stores close, there will still be plenty of B&M stores out there. And some like to think that Walmart and Amazon take a huge chunk of retail sales, but I think it’s much more fragmented.
Even more ironically, Amazon seems to be making plans to acquire physical stores for their fresh grocery business. I suspect that the main outcome will be to help Walmart close the gap.
Certainly Walmart will be dethroned from its current position at some point. But I suspect that it will be a few decades yet, if not longer. There’s such a big gap between Walmart and its main competitors.
There are a lot of costs involved with brick and mortar retail, which is how Amazon ever got so big, they can beat malls and Walmart on price. By building their own brick and mortar stores, they lose their advantage. If Amazon becomes another brick and mortar department store, they will fail.
Within a niche, incumbent successful fail when competitors get better and/or the incumbents get too complacent.
If a formerly large niche becomes a small one as new competing niche(s) open up, most or all of the inhabitants of the old niche will fail to make the transition to the new niche. It takes truly superhuman management foresight and skill for a major player to swap niches successfully.
Walmart, after a shaky and late start, is so far making a decent fist of moving into online sales and distribution. A bit like Microsoft’s late embrace of the internet and all things browser-y. And, like Microsoft, their glory days as a category killer may be behind them even as they continue to be a fully successful business for a couple more decades.
Yeah but in the 1960’s Sears was an already 80 yr old company which had successfully evolved (from mainly catalog retailer to large network of dept stores), and that’s 50 yrs ago. No company is likely to last for centuries*, but I don’t see it as easy to predict if Amazon and Walmart will still be highly successful companies a few decades from now.
*and most centuries-old companies do something very simple and traditional like hotels and breweries, few if any general retailers on those lists.
We’re thinking about giving Walmart’s grocery pickup a try.
Especially for canned foods, breads, cereal etc. Let them gather it up and bag. They even load it in the car.
I’d still go in to buy produce or meat. I want to select perishables myself.
That’s the kind of forward thinking business needs to compete against Amazon. They have to make shopping more and more convenient.
So you get the benefit of Walmart’s reasonable prices without having to step into a Walmart? (I looked, there’s no fee)
Sweet. I’ll try it next time I move somewhere a Walmart is close by. Walmarts are awful, it’s basically a reminder that for most people, life is mediocre and then you die.
Kinda like the DMV but IMO Walmart’s Muzak is louder and more grating.