It’s true that some other company might come along and blow past Amazon. At the same time Amazon doesn’t seem to be resting on their laurels. They’re both aggressive and innovative.
Moreover, they are buying up retail like Whole Foods, and looking at Target, but they didn’t buy Sears. That should tell us something.
A goodly part of the growth of Sears was the mail order they established in 1906, to sell to rural America. This catalog sales program was finally discontinued around 1993, but Sears was late to the game changing to e-commerce, and never regained their former prominence. For years Montgomery Wards and Sears were serious rivals, but with the waning importance of the catalog sales, both suffered a similar decline, as they established brick-and-mortar stores throughout smaller cities and even some relatively rural locations of less than 5,000 population. Montgomery Wards went belly up in 2000, and Sears, but for its alliance with the K-Mart chain, which was also failing, would have soon followed. But the two former giants could not help each other that much, even with consolidation of locations and supposedly fewer warehousing supply lines.
Wal-Mart, the big dog in Brick-and-mortar locations, has been experimenting with being the kind of e-commerce that made Amazon the retail giant it is, but they still have much more to grow in that direction, acting as an agent for the on-line sales by many much smaller retailers.
Thick on the best, to hell with the rest.
Years ago congress had hearings on the monopoly of A&P - Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. I think that there are only a few stores still existing.
Example, if I'm looking for ‘Egyptian cotton sheets’ I should NOT have most results be scammers who use the word ‘Egyptian’ in the description as in “Egyptian quality’ when it's some bamboo crap...
And Sears?
They should sell on Amazon as a trusted ‘source’ for delivering what they promise.Firebox wouldn't have had to change their platform if they had presented a way of donating on Amazon. Many of us do NOT want to put our credit card numbers in to hundreds of places on the Internet. Need to raise money? Put the plea on Amazon.