The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

by Scott Galloway

The biggest loser? Easy: Walmart. Walmart’s e-commerce growth hurdle reaches beyond Seattle: a workforce that’s both underpaid and lacking the skills to close the multichannel circle. Many of their customers are that group you’ve wondered about, who don’t have broadband or a smartphone. The wealthiest man in the twentieth century mastered the art of minimum-wage employees selling you stuff. The wealthiest man of the twenty-first century is mastering the science of zero-wage robots selling you stuff. The same day that Amazon bought Whole Foods, Walmart bought Bonobos,113 an online menswear retailer that had acquired brick-and-mortar stores. Bonobos has a strong multichannel model—customers are fitted on site, and clothes are later mailed. Similar to the Jet acquisition, Walmart hopes to derive e-commerce ethos from the smaller retailer, so as to compete against Amazon. Unlikely that Bonobos will make much of a difference, given the scale of the juggernaut. Even with the Jet.com and Bonobos acquisitions, Walmart’s share of online sales in 2017 was 1.9 percent, while Amazon’s was 36.2 percent.114 It’s hard—or impossible—to compete with a giant who doesn’t need to make money,115 and who reinvests earnings into deeper moats against the competition.116 Walmart is the largest grocery retailer in the United States, and the Whole Foods acquisition is a major escalation in its grocery wars with Amazon.117 Walmart has ten times the number of grocery stores than Whole Foods, but Amazo...

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