End of Amazon? Amazon Is Ubiquitous. But It Isn't Invincible Anymore
Amazon.com Inc.'s founder has long been obsessed with the company's beginning — and its end.
In 2013, Jeff Bezos told 60 Minutes that companies have short life spans, “even the shiniest and most important of any era.” In his final letter to shareholders as CEO in 2021, with Amazon valued at more than $1.5 trillion, he quoted a book by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to suggest that the e-commerce giant is in a constant state of “staving off death.”
The idea seemed absurd in the middle of the pandemic. Amazon's online sales had exploded as people avoided stores. Restless consumers, buoyed by stimulus payments, were on a shopping spree. Between 2019 and 2021, Amazon's online store sales grew 57% to more than $222 billion; subscription sales, which include its prized members' service Prime, surged 65%; and its share of consumer retail spending surged to overtake it biggest rival, Walmart Inc. It became more of a utility in consumers' minds than an online store. What would we have done without online delivery? Without Amazon? At the same time, retailers that had been lagging behind in e-commerce were forced to catch up — and fast. Nearly everyone from luxury names to department stores ramped up online. Walmart, for one, expanded its online assortment, opened its marketplace to international sellers, rolled out curbside and in-store pick up, and ramped up online order fulfillment out of its stores. In the first nine months of the pandemic, its online sales grew at twice the rate of Amazon's, albeit off a far smaller base, according to data from retail technology research firm YipitData.
Fast forward to today and Amazon no longer seems unassailable. This year saw the world's largest e-commerce company at one point lose a
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