Amazon has become a lot of our best friends during our time at home this year. Struggling to decide whether to head to Target to get goods at a cheaper price, we have all relied on Amazon to safely bring supplies to our homes without having to step out of the house. This ease of use and convenience has made people more and more reliant on Amazon (and other online retail locations) and has made people less and less reliant on Walmart (and other in-person retail locations). But is this really true? Are retail stores like Walmart and Target making less money than they did previously? Is Amazon making more money than they did previously? In this article, I want to debunk some myths and confirm some statements about the supposed fall of retail by analyzing data from this decade.
Data
The data I’m going to be using for this article can be found on Statista. One sample of data that I used can be found here. I don’t own this data and solely publish it in this article for educational purposes. The data will be used to graph and compare revenue generated by large companies (Target, Walmart, and Amazon specifically).
Before diving deeper into this matter, I wanted to just make a pretty important note:the fact that we are only looking at two extremely large in-person retailers may make the trends misleading. This is because bigger companies tend to perform well even in times of hardship. On the other hand, smaller retailers may struggle generating revenue during times of economic downfall and rising competition.
In-person retail
Let’s first look at in-person retail stores like Target and Walmart. We know that these are both multi-billion dollar companies, but does this mean that they are both still growing? Or are they falling? Let’s analyze their revenues to find out!
Walmart
As can be seen, Walmart’s annual revenue has increased over 50 billion since 2012. This shows that the company has indeed shown growth over the last seven years. So does that mean retail stores aren’t really declining?
Target
Unlike Walmart, Target has had its hiccups in the same seven year time period. Although we do see a spike near the end, it is actually not as drastic as it looks. Over the course of the last seven years, Target’s annual revenue has been relatively constant (between 70 billion and 80 billion dollars each year).
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