Amazon wants to become Walmart before Walmart can become Amazon
The future of retail will be a combination of both online e-commerce and a brick-and-mortar retail presence - as recent moves from both Walmart and Amazon have shown, including today's back-to-back announcements from the two rivals …
Context & Ripple Effects
The two biggest US retailers are now openly building each other's businesses. Back-to-back announcements from Amazon and Walmart land five months after Walmart's internal restructuring put its e-commerce CTO over store tech teams and handed Walmart.com marketing to the US CMO running Jet.com — an org chart that already fused digital and physical retail. The headline framing captures the logic: whichever side reaches full omnichannel first forces the other to fight on unfamiliar ground.
Amazon's subsequent moves show the strategy compounding rather than stalling: years later it pushed into rural US delivery infrastructure aimed squarely at Walmart's home territory, while opening its logistics network to Walmart marketplace sellers — literally monetizing the supply chains of the rival it is racing.
First-order effects
- Walmart and Amazon are now direct competitors in both directions at once — Amazon adding brick-and-mortar presence against Walmart's store network, Walmart accelerating online operations against Amazon's e-commerce lead.
- Walmart's January team consolidation means store technology and web commerce report through one e-commerce leadership structure, removing the internal wall between the two fronts.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's Multichannel Fulfillment move turns Walmart's own seller base into paying customers of Amazon's logistics, extracting revenue from the rival while expanding network scale.
- Amazon's rural distribution-center push attacks Walmart's geographic moat — proximity to small-town shoppers — which had been the one advantage e-commerce couldn't replicate.
Third-order effects
- If both converge fully, US retail consolidates around two vertically integrated omnichannel platforms whose moats are recomposed from single-channel advantages into combined physical-plus-logistical-plus-digital reach.
- Competitive pressure of this shape pushes both companies toward adjacent battlegrounds — payments (Walmart adopting contactless wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay in stores) and device ecosystems — where neither currently holds the advantage.
The trend: US retail is converging on a single omnichannel model in which Amazon and Walmart each must own the other's original moat — physical stores for Amazon, digital commerce and logistics for Walmart — to stay competitive.