Can Amazon Be Wal-Mart of the Web?
THE hum of 102 rooftop air conditioners and a chorus of beeping electric carts provide the acoustic backdrop in Amazon.com's 605,000-square-foot distribution facility on this city's west side. But the center's employees can almost always hear Terry Jones.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Times goes inside one of Amazon's 605,000-square-foot distribution centers to ask whether the company can become the Wal-Mart of the web — and the answer the piece documents is already under construction. Per the same-day reporting picked up by TechFlash, Amazon has launched a house brand of consumer electronics, capping a quiet multi-year private-label build-out spanning kitchenware, outdoor furniture, bed-and-bath goods, and power tools, while confirmed reporting shows it deliberately diversifying away from its online bookstore roots toward general retail.
The timing matters because Amazon's control over the written word itself was in play that same month: analysts were predicting Kindle editions of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol might outsell hardcovers on the site, and on September 2 Amazon publicly opposed Google's proposed book settlement — calling it an 'unprecedented' copyright hack — as part of the Open Book Alliance. Retail dominance, hardware, and digital distribution were converging in one company at once.
First-order effects
- Amazon's house-brand electronics line puts the company in direct competition with the third-party suppliers whose goods it sells, ships, and merchandises on its own site.
- Wal-Mart's general-merchandise playbook becomes Amazon's explicit benchmark: the confirmed move from books into kitchenware, furniture, bed-and-bath, and power tools shifts the contest from catalog depth to shelf breadth backed by owned fulfillment.
Second-order effects
- Suppliers competing against Amazon's private labels now face a counterparty that controls their storefront placement, search visibility, and logistics — pricing power tilts toward whoever owns the channel.
- Publishers' digital rights become a contested space between two platforms rather than settled by one, with Amazon fighting Google's book settlement through the Open Book Alliance while pushing its own Kindle ecosystem on the strength of titles like The Lost Symbol.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web retail consolidates around vertically integrated operators that host rivals' sales while undercutting them with house brands and setting the terms of digital distribution for entire content categories.
- Scale in owned fulfillment — the kind the Times tours in this facility profile — hardens into the decisive structural advantage, raising the capital bar any would-be challenger to Amazon or Wal-Mart must clear.
The trend: Retail is consolidating around vertically integrated operators whose house brands, fulfillment networks, and digital platforms let them set terms for the very suppliers they host.