WalMart vs. Amazon

[william the wie]

Walmart.com has more service centers than Amazon in the form of existing stores. Amazon has more automated inventory control base in the form of more robots. There is some rather iffy data that indicates that Walmart is taking some market share from Amazon as well as the Target transgender debacle.

So, the questions are

Which retailer is better placed to take advantage of custom built products and similar emerging tech?

Which founding family is doing a better job of not hurting their franchise?

 

[depotoo]

And which founding family is better preserving jobs.

 

[william the wie]

And which founding family is better preserving jobs.

Very good question and it depends on how Amazon temps are counted.

 

[DarkFury]

Walmart as far as jobs. But none you listed really lead in tech. I would have to give the tech to Verizon.

 

[william the wie]

Verizon retails what exactly

 

[Never3ndr]

Walmart.com has more service centers than Amazon in the form of existing stores. Amazon has more automated inventory control base in the form of more robots. There is some rather iffy data that indicates that Walmart is taking some market share from Amazon as well as the Target transgender debacle.

So, the questions are

Which retailer is better placed to take advantage of custom built products and similar emerging tech?

Which founding family is doing a better job of not hurting their franchise?

Amazon is better placed to take advantage of custom built products and emerging tech...mainly through their marketplace, they offer the function of more a facilitator between buyer and seller rather than actually retailing the product. It is this niche that is both growing and they have an exceptionally dominant position in. If you look at Amazon's retailing function, where they buy from sellers, warehouse the products, and then sell them to consumers, it is something that they are growing in, but compete in a different way to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is more traditional in looking for discount products to provide its consumers with brick and mortar stores while Amazon looks more for in-demand online products to buy and warehouse, then looks for cheaper and faster ways to get those high volume products to its consumers. As Amazon's market has the highest growth potential, we see Wal-Mart starting to try and increase its online platform (as all retailers are).

With that being said, your basic question ignores the fact that Wal-Mart isn't in competition for "custom built products and emerging tech." They are a discount retailer that looks to sell homogenous, discounted products that most consumers commonly need...like groceries, tee-shirts, toiletries, etc. In that market, Wal-Mart has a dominant stranglehold (although not as dominant as Amazon in its respective market).

On the "founding family"...Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of Wal-Mart...and he hasn't created some sort of family dynasty yet...he's still alive, well, and in-charge. On the other hand, Wal-Mart's family is a mess...in my opinion, most of them seem to act like white trash that just lucked into a family worth more than most.

A lot of people compare Amazon to Wal-Mart but, in fact, they aren't in the same markets, don't sell to the same types of consumers, and only compete in a tertiary rather than direct manner. The good thing about Amazon is that, as of right now, they don't have any real competition, at least in the American market...in the international market they have a lot more issues and potential competitors to work against. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, has several chains that compete against it including Target, the Dollar store chains, as well as grocery stores (since they do a lot of business in this market as well). In my opinion, Amazon is worth a long hold as they have great growth potential and are showing a good interest at expanding into different markets...their AWS is worth a look here as I feel like cloud computing is the future. However, in the short term I think that their stock is overpriced.