The End Of Amazon

It’s wildly innovative, persistently disruptive and laser-focused on its customers. Its iconic founder is among the richest men in the history of planet earth. Its growth trajectory is so staggering that brands across the spectrum have little choice but to partner with it or suffer the anguish of competing against it. It is feared, admired, even hated, but above all, it is seemingly invincible. While this may seem a fitting description of the American e-commerce giant Amazon, these are also precisely the sorts of superlatives used, not long ago, to describe another retailer, one that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos forged much of his go-to-market philosophy around: Walmart. Between 1962 and the early 2000s, Walmart ruled retail, laying to waste scores of competitors large and small. By 2010 Walmart had opened an astonishing 4,393 stores, with more than 3,000 of those coming after 1990. If retail had a Roman Legion, it was Walmart. Yet, despite its legendary rise, in 2015 Walmart posted its very first sales decline since going public 45 years earlier and has since found itself fighting an existential, quarter-to-quarter battle to reclaim its mojo. Now, it’s been forced to shed nearly 60 years of skin in a frantic effort to reinvent itself for a world that has changed around it. Whether Walmart survives this new age of retail or not remains debateable, but one thing is certain: the decline of the once impenetrable juggernaut has proven that even the most titanic businesses can fall. Read more at The Business of Fashion.