In 2005, an activist-academic who would go on to head Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers committed a public act of “progressive” apostasy:
The lower prices at Wal-Mart are staggering. They are 8 to 40 percent lower than what people would pay elsewhere. The total annual savings in one recent study … for consumers are $263 billion. That’s $2,300 for every household in America. They’re very few public policies that I’ve advocated in my life that would make as big a difference as that.
Then things got better.
Amazon and Walmart are locked in a planet-spanning duel to not only supply consumers affordable goods, but deliver purchases as conveniently as possible. Their conflict is chronicled in Jason Del Rey’s Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets (Harper Business; 304 pages; $32.00).
Bentonville was slow to respond to the threat from e-commerce. Del Rey notes that Amazon, founded in the summer of 1994,
first attacked Walmart in general merchandise — from books to electronics. Then it went after Walmart’s core grocery business, both in the digital world and later the physical world. Along the way, the tech giant carried out a yearslong offensive to convince Walmart’s most valuable customers to defect to Amazon Prime. Not all efforts were successful, but the pace was unrelenting. For the first time since the launch of the Supercenter, Walmart was on its back feet. Walmart, “Everyday Low Price” stalwart, destroyer of any and all competition, was finally an underdog.
Readers seeking the details of how Sam Walton built his empire, and/or the early days of Jeff Bezos’s behemoth, should look elsewhere. Winner Sells All is “the story of the defining business clash of this generation.” In a larger sense, though, the book is a testament to the gloriousness of capitalism.
Sam Walton understood that “the customer” is the “only” boss, capable of firing “everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” The “Walmart leaders who followed him,” Del Rey writes, agreed that “savings” was “the retailer’s entire reason for being.” Then Jeff Bezos came along, and added convenience to the mission. Amazon’s “longtime obsession wasn’t about making life better or easier for its employees; it was about making life better for customers.”
Winner Sells All meticulously documents the dozens of ways the companies have attempted to outmaneuver each other in tech, logistics, and marketing. Along the way, you’ll learn plenty of fun facts, such as:
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