Amazon accounts for roughly 40% of all US online retail sales—a much larger piece of the pie than its competitor Walmart

Although Walmart is roughly 30 years older than Amazon, the e-commerce giant has a significant lead in online US retail sales: Walmart's share is roughly 7%. Season 33 of the podcast "Business Wars," hosted by David Brown, is all about one of the most intense rivalries in all of retail.

Walmart was the first traditional retailer to crack the $1T club

In early 2026, the company joined major tech companies Nvidia, Apple, and Meta (among others) as one of the rare firms with a market capitalization beyond $1T. See the latest top companies here.

Amazon's success is attributable, in large part, to founder Jeff Bezos’ vision

Bezos parlayed a career on Wall Street into founding an online bookstore that would evolve into the largest online retailer in the world. Bezos’ story is characterized by his relentless focus on innovation and on the customer experience at Amazon.

Amazon expanded its business and diversified its offerings by acquiring companies

Amazon’s retail and cloud businesses have been key drivers of the company’s growth over the years, but they haven’t done all the work by themselves. Companies Amazon has acquired include the video doorbell maker Ring, the grocer Whole Foods, the streaming service Twitch, the shoe retailer Zappos, and the film studio MGM.

The Walton family behind Walmart is the world’s richest family with $432B

The world’s 10 richest families, including the families behind Hermès and Mars, control hundreds of billions of dollars worth of the world’s wealth.

In 1994, Amazon was founded as an online bookseller

Books were just the start, as founder Jeff Bezos' ultimate goal was to create an "everything store," using the internet to transcend the physical limitations of brick-and-mortar retail. The Seattle-based Amazon gradually added CDs and consumer electronics, becoming a dominant e-commerce player in the late 1990s, and one of the few dot-com companies to make it through the bust.

See a visualization of the most popular e-commerce companies in America

Amazon’s app sees more users than the next four most popular e-commerce apps (like Temu, Walmart, and others) combined.

Amazon's largest profit engine is its cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services, which generated over 60% of Amazon's total operating income in 2024.

See America's top companies by revenue in 1994 versus 2023—Sears isn't on the 2023 list, while Amazon isn't in the 1994 edition.

Amazon has experienced relentless, if occasionally bumpy, growth since its founding

From its founding in 1994 to a slew of acquisitions and new products and services launched in the decades since then, Amazon has experienced relentless, if occasionally bumpy, growth. This timeline from The Verge lays out some of the major events in the company’s story, including its IPO, rollout of its lucrative cloud-computing division, and much more.

One of the most important pieces of Amazon’s corporate empire? Its Prime subscription business

Prime drives customer loyalty and boosts Amazon’s revenue through its monthly and yearly fees. The key components included with a Prime subscription include free two-day shipping on eligible items, as well as access to services like Amazon Music and Prime Video.

Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos' wealth primarily stems from his Amazon ownership stake.

Bezos has frequently cited a 1999 article titled Amazon.bomb to illustrate how dire the early predictions about Amazon got

Over the years, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos often recalls how wrong the predictions in the 1999 Barron’s cover story were. Among other things, that article declared Amazon’s entire business model to be unsustainable and destined to fail, noting its lack of profit and dependence on a massive amount of capital to fund its growth.

Listen to a podcast that traces the history of DOJ antitrust enforcement

This podcast series traces how the US government's approach to regulating big business has changed over a century—from the DOJ's breakup of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly, through lawyer Robert Bork's influence on how courts interpret competition law, to the FTC's modern antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.

11,000 new US dollar stores opened between 2007 and 2017

Dollar store retailers experienced significant fiscal gains during the 2010s, which were then accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. But in recent years, dollar stores have been closing in large numbers and suffering financial hardship. Experts point to Walmart's strategy of decreasing prices to cater to inflation-fatigued customers, and point out that when Walmart does well financially, dollar stores typically suffer.

Amazon has historically opposed efforts among its employees to unionize

Amazon has done everything from creating mandatory anti-union meetings to hiring union-busting consultants, and even engaging in employee surveillance. Such efforts have proven to be a lightning rod for pro-labor groups.

How Netflix battled Blockbuster

The most consequential business stories involve intense rivalries. The story of Netflix versus Blockbuster is one of those: an agile upstart versus an entrenched incumbent. This nine-part podcast explores the key strategies and pivotal moments in the rivalry that upended the entertainment business, setting the stage for the streaming wars.

Bezos owned roughly 8% of Amazon as of 2025

Three decades after founding Amazon, Jeff Bezos has built a sprawling empire of businesses and financial interests. Other large stakeholders in the company include Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy and Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott. This article provides more details on who owns how much of Amazon.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos emphasizes worrying about customers rather than competition

In a 1999 shareholder letter, Bezos wrote, "I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Our customers have made our business what it is, and we consider them to be loyal to us – right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service." Motivated by fear, the entrepreneur advocates consistent innovation, experimentation, and improvement to create a better customer experience.

Screaming, running, and chaos in retailers like Walmart are the norm on Black Friday

This Black Friday episode from Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast features stories both from people who have worked behind the register on Black Friday and those who have stood in line at 4 am to score some deals. From police escorting violent shoppers competing over a discounted laptop computer out of the building, to a false-alarm emergency exit from a Dick's Sporting Goods, the episode is both harrowing and hilarious at times.

Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model

Central to any understanding of the multifaceted nature of Amazon's business today is the concept of the "flywheel" at the heart of the company. Put simply, it's an idea that refers to a self-reinforcing cycle that drives the continuous growth of Amazon's various businesses, including its retail arm, its Prime subscription service, and more.

Sears failed to evolve in a changing economy

At its peak, Sears was the largest retailer in the world, making elite objects accessible to the middle class. But in 2018, the company officially filed for bankruptcy due to massive debt and losses.

Amazon sends its first-ever letter to shareholders every year

The first letter to Amazon’s shareholders, written by founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos in 1997, is a key part of the Amazon story—laying out the company’s long-term approach to the business and several of its core operating values. Bezos emphasizes, for example, Amazon’s plan to start with a bookstore but to evolve into a much larger ecosystem.

Costco and Amazon have very similar pricing across everyday staples

This article compares the average prices of everyday staples at Amazon and Costco, like toilet paper ($1.12 at Costco, $1.14 on Amazon), to help consumers decide which discount retailer to purchase from.

Amazon didn't have a profitable quarter until 2001, more than 6 years into its existence

Jeff Bezos, however, took pride in Amazon's early unprofitability, reinvesting the money Amazon made back into its business, prioritizing investment into long-term growth and customer acquisition over short-term gains.

America’s richest families

You could probably name a few of America's richest people, like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, for instance. But could you name the richest families in America, like the Waltons or the Mars family? Explore the list of 2024's richest families in America—and find out how they made their money—here.

Around 60% of female billionaires in the US are considered self-made—meaning at least some of their wealth comes from a business venture launched on their own.

Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post in 2013

He purchased the legacy newspaper with the intention of bringing it into the internet age, thereby helping improve its financials. Bezos’ ownership of the newspaper has been widely criticized, particularly by those who do not want the wealthiest in the country to have that much influence on the press. One Bezos critic explains the standpoint further in this article.

The National Retail Federation coined the term ‘Cyber Monday’ in 2005

As online-only retailers like Amazon expanded in the early 2000s, they sought ways to capitalize on Black Friday’s uptick in sales—but they didn’t actually have physical retail stores. Enter: Cyber Monday, a day that now competes with Black Friday for the highest e-commerce sales day of the year.

The world's top streaming services (by subscriber count)

With almost 270 million paying users, Netflix is the dominant force in streaming entertainment. But after enjoying a first-mover advantage for years, competitors are beginning to catch up. Most notable is Amazon, which leverages its Prime subscriptions to bundle Prime Video, and has amassed an estimated 200 million users. See an updated tracker of the world's biggest platforms by audience.

Amazon has fulfillment centers all over the world

Amazon fulfillment centers are the large warehouses where products that customers have ordered are stored, packed, and shipped. In order to efficiently manage inventory and process millions of orders each day, the centers rely heavily on advanced technology and robotics.

Multiple business choices may have hindered Sears’ financial success

There’s no shortage of potential culprits for Sears’ death, from hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert, to Amazon, to the 2008 stock market crash.

SoftBank acquired a majority stake in WeWork in October 2019

SoftBank is widely considered the biggest victim in the WeWork story, losing billions of dollars that it invested in the company while WeWork’s CEO walked away a billionaire himself.

Inside one of the last Sears stores in the US

Sears was once one of the most successful businesses in the US. Today, there aren’t many Sears stores left in the nation, and the ones that are still around feel more like ghost towns than meccas of retail history.

Amazon fires: Causes, impact, and prevention strategies

This article explores the issue of rampant fires in the Amazon rainforest, detailing their root causes, devastating impacts, and potential prevention methods. The Amazon rainforest's unique biodiversity and climate conditions make it unsuitable for...

Many of the manufacturers selling items on Temu also supply goods to Amazon

They also often make products for other stores, including Target and Walmart. However, unlike these competitors, Temu doesn’t own any of the products it sells.

JCPenney offers an average Black Friday discount of 59%—higher than most other US retailers

This data visualization ranks retailers like Target, Walmart, Macy’s, and more by who has the best Black Friday deals on average. Specifically, the visualization uses data from 13 major US retailers in 2023.

Immersive technologies are increasingly being used in medicine, retail, and education

More accessible devices and user-friendly tools have increased the adoption of these technologies, which provide interactive, 3D environments that facilitate natural human learning. In 2018, Walmart purchased 17,000 VR headsets to train over a million employees in areas such as customer service and Black Friday preparation.