Amazon.^107 Walmart has ten times the number of grocery stores than
Whole Foods, but Amazon’s logistics are likely to outsmart it.
Even Google Is Getting Amazoned
Google is, relatively speaking, losing to Amazon. Amazon is Google’s
largest customer and is better at optimizing search than Google is at
optimizing Amazon. Not to say that Google isn’t an amazing company,
but the good money is on Amazon to beat Google in the race to a
trillion. Searches for product are lucrative—they get healthy bids, as
there may be a purchase at the end of it, vs. stalking your high-school
crush. Amazon’s search franchise may rival Google’s in value someday,
as the people looking to spend start their search at Amazon. But the
real victim is traditional retail, whose only growth channel, online, is
sunsetting at the hands of Amazon. Each year, Google and brand.coms
lose product search volume to Amazon (6 to 12 percent for retailers for
2015 to 2016). Conventional thinking is that consumers are
researching on brand sites, then going to Amazon to buy. In reality, 55
percent of product searches start on Amazon (vs. 28 percent on search
engines such as Google).^108 This shifts the power, and margin, from
Google and retailers to Amazon.
Other Losers: The Unremarkable
I was a remarkably unremarkable kid. I had mediocre grades, but
didn’t test well either. In high school, I worked as a box boy at The
Westward Ho in Westwood, California, and made about $4/hr.
During my freshman year at UCLA I got a job, again as a box boy,
this time at Vicente Foods in Brentwood. However, this time, as a
member of the United Food & Commercial Workers International
Union Local 770, my $13/hr salary paid for my $1,350/year in-state
tuition, and then some. Vicente Foods is still there, so it doesn’t appear
that the 200 percent wage premium that put me through school put
Vicente Foods out of business.
In 1984 it was possible to be a remarkably unremarkable kid with a
part-time job and pay your way through a tier-1 university. Things