Jason Del Rey has spent the last 15 years reporting on e-commerce businesses, including Walmart and Amazon. Now, in a new book that hit the shelves today called The winner sells everythingtells the larger story of Walmart, long focused on preserving what it had built, and its epic battle with Amazon, whose land-and-expand strategy has led to the lucrative cloud storage business, grocery business , logistics. industry, hardware and even Hollywood.

Indeed, what started as an annoyance for Walmart and then turned into a bare-knuckle fight turned in more recent years into an existential crisis for the 61-year-old business, and Del Rey finds out what the company is doing about it. At the same time, he examines the challenges Amazon, 29, increasingly faces, including a growing inability to move quickly as before and its stubborn reluctance to address serious criticism.

with access to walmart CEO Doug McMillon, Jeff Wilke, the now-former CEO of Amazon’s global consumer business, and 150 other sources, including other executives from both companies, the story Del Rey tells is about innovation, but it’s also about growth. of these two giants. have meant to consumers, to your employees and even to the environment. We spoke to him yesterday, excerpts of which have been lightly edited below for length.

TC: I wonder if you knew going into this that this would be a story of how Walmart has just tried to catch up with Amazon, and has often come up short. Amazon’s market capitalization is more than three times that of Walmart at this point: $1.3 trillion to 400 billion. The book seems to stress that this rivalry is over. Would you say that is accurate?

JD: The book leans heavily on CEO Doug McMillon’s tenure at Walmart for the past 10 years and all the trials and tribulations of an incredibly successful company dealing with an upstart who first ignores, then pays attention to, but not really. does not execute its competitive strategy well. Within the company, many of you know, the CEO among them felt like (by 2016) saying, ‘If we don’t make up some ground soon, I know it sounds ridiculous to some people, but we may not really be here.’ . in a couple of decades.

You say in the book that you once spoke to US Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, whose district includes Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, and she said that Amazon’s usual response to criticism is that there is a general rejection of any criticism that is real. Do you share that same observation?

Amazon is now an easy target for different groups, often for some really credible reasons, but there are also a whole host of people who love to hate the company. That being said, in recent years, especially with regards to the way they have interacted with powerful people in government, (Amazon) has just displayed a lack of conscience or just plain arrogance (and) has unnecessarily made more enemies than it intended. needed. (Meanwhile) Walmart execs, whether selfish or not, have gone on listening tours of critics over the years, at least pretending to want to hear the other side of things.

Slow-moving Walmart wanted Quidsi and lost it to Amazon; he lost PillPack to Amazon. Amazon’s cultural issues, labor relations issues, Justice Department issues, etc. aside, has he been particularly shocked by any of Amazon’s operational missteps?

A lot of media and even tech folks assumed (after acquiring Whole Foods in 2017) Amazon would go into physical retail as the innovator and smartest guys and gals in the room and just get it right, and it really has been quite a flop. great to date. One thing they’ve struggled with is thinking that technological differentiation would be enough, and not that they haven’t cared about operations getting the right inventory or the right food, but that has felt like an afterthought. So you walk into some of their brick-and-mortar retail locations, and the in-store experience feels like an afterthought compared to the checkout technology or high-tech carts at some of their grocery stores that are counting your stuff. For some people, that’s good enough, but for the everyday consumer, I think they’ve had trouble differentiating themselves.

Amazon has since bought PillPack. You have acquired One Medical (which has many hundreds of physical offices). Do you think we will see similar missteps in your approach to health care?

Amazon had a service called Amazon Care, which was a combination of telehealth and in-home concierge visits. It was only for Amazon employees at first and ended up getting close before it could really expand beyond that, but when I talked to nurses and technologists who worked on that project, (they said) Amazon was often going into the space thinking about what needed to be improved in health care or what was wrong, versus what was already right. I don’t know if that’s arrogance, or just the way they operate. But some of the nurses I spoke to said there were healthcare record software services out there that were really good, but (Amazon) spent all this time trying to build (theirs) from scratch, and that caused all kinds of problems. .

Regarding the PillPack acquisition, I tell an anecdote in the book (about) the entrepreneurs who built PillPack and went to work at Amazon, and had some success, but also got stifled after a while and realized what hard it would be to build pharma tech inside a now fairly old retail tech division, so it’s not that different from Walmart. . . The bureaucracy has crept in and businessmen may have a hard time there too.

Sometimes companies reach such a scale that they seem completely immune to any kind of upstart until they don’t. We’re talking here about Amazon beating Walmart; Who should Amazon care more about? If you had to bet on who could topple Amazon, who would you pick?

I think Shopify is still a very interesting company. I know it’s not a retailer, but it’s a really great technology company. Maybe they overreached, trying to get into logistics and had to spin off that operation at a loss. But there are really smart people who care about independent businesses, so the question will be whether they can or really want to build a consumer-facing presence, and Amazon pays a lot of attention to them. The other one I think is TikTok. Amazon is essentially a transaction portal, right? Many people go there knowing what they want, so they go to buy something, not to go shopping. I think TikTok still has a lot of potential to play a big role in people who actually want to shop right now online and not just go somewhere just to push to pay or buy, so there’s a lot of potential. If they can deliver, I have no idea. There’s also a very good chance that 20 years from now, we’ll look back and say XYZ Company is now a huge, huge business, and it didn’t even exist in 2023. My hope is maybe for the health of the economy. and the health of society, that could also be the case.

We’ll have more of this interview later this week in podcast form; stay tuned.