It’s bigger than most brick and mortar retailers together
The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.
What has more value: all major publicly traded department stores in the United States, or Amazon?
Amazon takes the cake, and its no contest.
Add together the market caps of Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, JCPenney, Sears, and Macy’s, and they amount to a significant $297.8 billion:
| Brick & Mortar Store | 2016 Value ($B) |
|---|---|
| Total | $297.8 |
| Sears | $1.1 |
| JCPenney | $2.6 |
| Nordstrom | $8.3 |
| Kohl’s | $8.8 |
| Macy’s | $11.0 |
| Best Buy | $13.2 |
| Target | $40.6 |
| Walmart | $212.4 |
However, it’s not enough to beat the Amazon machine.
The online retailer alone is worth $356 billion, making it one of the largest companies by market capitalization in the world.
The Death of Traditional Retail
Ten years ago, the future of brick and mortar retail sill looked bright. The aforementioned retailers were worth a collective $400 billion, and Amazon was only valued at $17.5 billion.
But disruption often comes without warning. Or if there were warning signs, they went unheeded by retailers.
Big box and department store sales plummeted, as consumers increasingly went online to do their shopping. This year, it is estimated that revenues are equal to just 62% of their totals in 2006:
Big Box and Department Store Sales ($ Billion)
Retailers without the right strategy saw their market caps plummet.
Sears went from being worth $27.8 billion to $1.1 billion (a 96% decrease), while JCPenney went from $18.1 billion to $2.6 billion (a 86% decrease).
Here’s the full damage over the last 10 years to brick and mortar stores:
| Store | 2006 Value ($B) | 2016 Value ($B) | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | $400.4 | $297.8 | -26% |
| Sears | $27.8 | $1.1 | -96% |
| JCPenney | $18.1 | $2.6 | -86% |
| Nordstrom | $12.4 | $8.3 | -33% |
| Kohl’s | $24.2 | $8.8 | -64% |
| Macy’s | $24.2 | $11.0 | -55% |
| Best Buy | $28.4 | $13.2 | -54% |
| Target | $51.3 | $40.6 | -21% |
| Walmart | $214.0 | $212.4 | -1% |
Amazon, on the other hand, did okay for itself.
The online retailer gained 1,934% in value over the same timeframe, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world, and a key piece of Jeff Bezos’ business empire.
I remember when the internet first really started going, it was 1995. At that time the experts said how wonderful it was, and all these people could sell products. How did that work out? All we really have is Amazon, it’s become a monopoly. Once the monopoly is firmly in place, and there’s no competition, it can squeeze your balls.
Eh,as I refuse to support bezos and his BS the a gets nothing from me,now they want you to solve captchas before seeing a item/getting on site,so fuck that noise!I have always with work found better pricing then the a,am sure they will be fine without me though.
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Sure Amazon aggregates all the shopping choices sort of like Drudge does news, but the choice to shop elsewhere remains and is still yours to make. But shopping at the thousands of different on line stores is so much tedious work for many that they just do it all at one stop Amazon.
It’s not Amazon’s fault that Americans are to lazy to comparison shop before pulling the trigger at Amazon. That’s on US.
Dutchman, in spite of your impressive total recall, I’d like to remind you that 1995 was like two weeks ago. Did you not notice us old farts discussing the first Star Wars in breathless tones? If you really want to impress, write about watching AG Bell conducting the first long distance call in Chicago.
Amazon is a bad news scam. Best avoided.
Need for anti-trust actions against Amazon, Google and Facebook. But I’m not sure how Facebook could be broken up-maybe it would have to be nationalized and then sold to the non-cultural Marxist Russians. Nah, have to have find to some way to break it up.
profit figures? admin does a good job on this on articles he has posted,target,sears,jc penney etc,
would like him to dissect this one..i work in online retailing with a slick operating multinational,that has bricks and mortar and online operations, and I reckon amazons figures are full off shit because the profit margins are thin as fuck.
Admin will get a week long hard on when Sears folds. I can hardly wait for his ” I told you so” story. I love those.
The most important rule for any business selling something, be it a service or product, it to make it easy for the customer to buy.
Amazon does a decent job of this and appeals to a wider spread of customers than the other retailers do (i.e. try to buy a new RO tank or an out of print book from Walmart of Target, things I’ve bought from Amazon during the past year).
Amazon has a larger potential size so customer base than any other retailer outside of eBay, and eBay is pretty much an entirely different category of sales scheme.