Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets

Contents
 
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Contents
 Prologue
 Chapter 1: What If?
 Chapter 2: Jet Fuel
 Chapter 3: Hometown Boy
 Chapter 4: The Takeover
 Chapter 5: Prime Attack
 Chapter 6: Not Ready for Prime Time
 Chapter 7: Amazon Sends a Wake-Up Call
 Chapter 8: Amazonification
 Chapter 9: The Greatest Retailer on the Planet
 Chapter 10: Old School vs. New School
 Chapter 11: Retail Doctors
 Chapter 12: Pandemic Power Struggle
 Chapter 13: Walmart 2040
 Chapter 14: Winner Sells All
 Acknowledgments
 Notes
 Index
 About the Author
 Copyright
 About the Publisher
 
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Contents
 Prologue
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 iv
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Dedication
 For my parents, Patricia and Bernard,
 who stressed curiosity, compassion, and preparation while raising me
 and for my wife, Tyrene,
 who inspired me to become a better man while saving me
 
 
 Epigraph
 “There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
 —SAM WALTON
 
 
 Contents
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Prologue
 Chapter 1: What If?
 Chapter 2: Jet Fuel
 Chapter 3: Hometown Boy
 Chapter 4: The Takeover
 Chapter 5: Prime Attack
 Chapter 6: Not Ready for Prime Time
 Chapter 7: Amazon Sends a Wake-Up Call
 Chapter 8: Amazonification
 Chapter 9: The Greatest Retailer on the Planet
 Chapter 10: Old School vs. New School
 Chapter 11: Retail Doctors
 Chapter 12: Pandemic Power Struggle
 Chapter 13: Walmart 2040
 Chapter 14: Winner Sells All
 Acknowledgments
 Notes
 Index
 About the Author
 Copyright
 About the Publisher
 
 
 Prologue
 The first time I met Jeff Bezos, I asked him what he was wearing.
 It was the spring of 2016, and I had been hoping to sit down with the then-CEO of Amazon before he appeared onstage at an annual tech event hosted by my employer at a California cliffside resort. At the time, I had been reporting on Amazon for three years but still hadn’t met Bezos other than a passing hello as he was whisked out the door at a different conference two years earlier. As disappointing as that was, it was not all that surprising. As Bezos’s wealth and fame ballooned, his PR team shielded him from the journalists who knew his company best. I can’t say I totally blamed them: the Amazon story was splintering away from a pure, feel-good tale of great American ingenuity into a narrative with more complicated offshoots, and he or his advisers seemed to have determined that avoiding the toughest conversations was the smart move.
 So, when I was told by Amazon’s PR department that a meeting wasn’t going to happen, I decided to make my own meeting by waiting for Bezos backstage. I wasn’t planning to ambush him; I was simply looking to strike up a conversation that might create an opening for more substantive discussions down the line. As the event approached, I strategized about what my opening line should be; I knew it would only be a matter of time before his security team or his PR handlers made my life difficult. Then I got some inspiration: Fortune magazine had recently ranked Bezos No. 1 on their 2016 list of the fifty “World’s Greatest Leaders” and, in the accompanying profile, the famous entrepreneur mentioned one of the new Amazon initiatives in which he was most interested: the company’s foray into private-label clothing—basically, clothing lines that Amazon would source, brand, and sell itself. Not necessarily the sexiest of product categories, but one that my nerdy retail brain was also interested in, so I decided to latch on.
 With that in mind, I thought I might succeed both at showing Bezos that I was paying close attention and at making him laugh if I opened with something like: “Hey, Jeff. I’m Jason Del Rey from Recode. I recently read that you are spending a lot of time on Amazon’s private-label business. Are you wearing any Amazon brands today?”
 On the day of the event, Bezos stood alone backstage, watching the onstage interview that preceded his from a monitor. He was dressed in a dark blazer, dark denim jeans, and light-colored button-up, along with