CNBC is reporting that MKM Partners analyst Rob Sanderson’s latest chart shows a striking gap that has widened between Amazon and store-based retailers (Wal-Mart, Taraget, Costco, Home Depot, etc.) over the past year. While Amazon still only boasts a 5 percent share of total retail sales, excluding food, across the country, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Sanderson’s chart shows Amazon, in the categories that the company serves, growing its market share, as brick-and-mortar retail sales are on the decline.
The median growth for what MKM Partners calls the top-20 U.S. retailers was 2.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016, 0.8 percent during the first quarter of 2017, and is forecast to decline by 0.2 percent in the second quarter this year, the firm said.
Notice how the gap completely shifted starting from 2013.
The latest hike in Amazon’s share price is “becoming large enough to make an impact,” Sanderson wrote. “This [trend] does not end well for traditional retailers and many will go the way of Borders and Circuit City, leaders in the first two large categories disrupted by Amazon.com.”
Sanderson states simply that Amazon is the “best long-term growth story available to investors today”
With an Amazon-Whole Foods deal in the making, pressure is about to hit traditional grocers head-on, as an internet giant takes on the “high-frequency” fresh foods market, MKM Partners added. “[P]ressures on traditional retailers will only get worse.”