Amazon may end up becoming the first company to be worth $1 trillion, according to analyst firm L2 founder Scott Galloway. Galloway claims that the United States is saturated with physical retail stores, and Amazon is in a good position to replace a large number of them. While Amazon is exploring rolling out its own brick-and-mortar shops, its online retail presence is continuously growing. Options like AmazonFresh and AmazonSmile have made the retailer much more appealing to consumers in recent years, and discounts on household staples like cleaning items and diapers for Prime members have seen many shift the bulk of their routine shopping to Amazon.
Galloway recently spoke of the existing retail scene essentially draining into a far smaller number of actors, with Amazon in the best position to get the most of that situation. He says that big players like Walmart stand to watch their businesses decline, and a good number of cashiers and other retail associates stand to lose their jobs. He goes on to explain that he has heard multiple figureheads in the retail industry talk about potentially cutting down resource usage, which would of course include human resource and payroll overhead. Amazon’s upcoming retail store concept includes no cashiers, meaning its potential success would accelerate retail job losses. On the online front, Galloway predicts that Amazon may be able to encourage customers to shift more of their shopping to its platform in the future, with the spending in the average Amazon Prime household projected to jump from around $1,300 per year to upwards of $7,000 per year in some unspecified future.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is already the second richest person alive, and the retail empire’s projected growth will see it quickly outpace competitors in sheer size. Amazon’s other ventures promise to see it outstrip competitors in a wide range of fields, if its various projects succeed. The tech giant is heavily involved in projects like delivery drones, self-driving cars, and even home automation. Amazon’s powerful and conversational Alexa platform sits at the center of most operations in the consumer sector outside of retail, driving the Amazon Echo and starting to appear on a number of different platforms and devices. Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, drive growth in the enterprise segment, attracting developers and webmasters of all kinds with attractive pricing and a feature set that keeps it just above its two closest rivals, the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.