The retail apocalypse is in full force in 2023 — and Amazon is only making it more deadly for many retailers. In recent years, the shopping behavior of consumers has dramatically changed. Nowadays, more and more people are entirely relying on the internet for any purchasing. And brick-and-mortar stores have been closing by the thousands as competition in the sector is getting tougher.
According to a Morgan Stanley analysis, Amazon accounts for almost a third of all retail sales and is responsible for half of the growth in the sector.
From household products to electronics, clothing, and groceries, everything is available on the platform, and that’s a huge advantage for the company. However, that is absolutely killing other brands that have been with us for decades, and many of them are at risk of going under this year amid a new wave of retail bankruptcies.
The megaretailer has been blamed for the downfall of major chains, forever changing the way we shop, and crushing millions of small businesses. But the truth is that the path to total Amazon domination is just beginning. One investment firm has even created a “Death by Amazon” index that tracks the stock prices of retail chains they believe are most threatened by the online retailer.
In 2017, the company at the top of the index was Toys R Us. Back then, the retailer was offering discounts to customers in an attempt to attract them back after Amazon made it all too easy to buy the hottest toys at the click of a button. But still, sales continued to decline by double digits, and in September of that year, the company filed for bankruptcy due to the $5 billion debt it had accrued.
Every year since then, the index has accurately forecasted which companies will be knocked down by Amazon, even predicting the demise of JPMorgan in 2020, and more recently, the collapse of Bed, Bath & Beyond. This year, many retail giants are reporting dropping sales, slower foot traffic, declining revenues, and announcing store closings. Hundreds of brick-and-mortar retailers are currently on Moody’s bankruptcy watchlist.
Blue Apron is one of them. Data shows that since Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, Blue Apron has been hanging by a thread. Since 2021, the company is on a bankruptcy watchlist, and the non-essential service is likely to get hit hard as the downturn unfolds.
Macy’s is also seen as another potential victim of the ‘Amazon effect’ in 2023. The department store has been declining for a while, and Amazon’s growth has hastened its downfall. Hundreds of Macy’s stores have disappeared since the pandemic, sales are down, and the outlook remains discouraging for the retailer.
Retail experts suggest that the biggest bankruptcy of the year was also fueled by Amazon. For years, Bed Bath & Beyond was struggling with falling profits, and the home furnishing sector has been feeling the squeeze since the e-commerce company started offering free shipping to many shoppers. In April, the brand filed for bankruptcy and closed 360 stores nationwide.
All of this shows that the impact of the Amazon Effect has been undeniable. Amazon is putting its flag in the ground in one industry after another, cementing its role as the global leader in virtually everything.
Many companies are now gone, due in part to pressure from the online retailer that’s upended the American retail landscape. And if others figure out a solution fast, they might be the next stores destroyed by Amazon.
Article and video cross-posted from Epic Economist.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
What are the chances that Amazon will greatly increase prices after it achieves a virtual monopoly?
Monopolies historically never raise the prices. That is a false theory that never pans out, unless government is involved.
Quit blaming Amazon for everything. Bed, Bath & Beyond self-destructed due to wokeness. Dropping Mike Lindell’s products unleashed a massive conservative boycott that finished the company off. Don’t be surprised if Target, Anheuser-Busch and Disney die of the same terminal lunacy. As for other retailers, rampant theft in big blue cities is causing 100X more store closures than Amazon.
Agreed. We can also blame leftist law enforcement policies which have forced many stores to lock up products, making it inconvenient to shop there. Also, corporations who who pay their customer service people low wages, resulting in unknowledgeable and unmotivated workers. Might as well do your own research and buy on the Internet.
True, a lot of the stores are gone because of the shortsightedness of shoppers ignoring local & small businesses to save a couple dollars. But some of them are gone due to state & local politicians ignorantly closing “non-essential” businesses during the covid fraud, exempting the big corporate stores.
Many of those currently closing are doing so because they’ve embraced woke policies & lost most of their business..
Problem is, Amazon is no different. In addition to woke bs, they also endorse blasphemy, satanism, perversion, and child mutilation. We will soon find that all commerce is centered in PC/DEI behemoths, and consumer choice will be gone.
I don’t feel sorry for big box stores or shopping malls. Look at how many small business went under when these leviathons started selling their crap. Now they are getting a little bao ying (bad karma) from Amazon. And personally, Amazon is a lifeline for me. I’m retired and I don’t drive because I have poor eyesight and I can’t afford a car. So when I need something I just order it and it’s at my door in a day or too. And I’ve never had problems with returns either. Usually they will tell me to keep whatever it is I’m dissatisfied with and they will refund me or send the right item. I’m no fan of bezos but I really like Amazon.
right on! You beat me to it. They cut their own throat.
big box stores killed mom and pop, and now amazon will kill big box stores. one thing is for sure, people still like to shop, and this is where mom and pop can rise again. People WILL pay more for the convenience of buying something right then and there and taking it home. Mom and pop can really be successful if the merch is made in USA, by some local or national company that makes QUALITY products and not cheap Chinese CRAP like everything sold on Amazon. So, this isnt necessarily a bad thing.
At first this bothered me. But as the box stores have tried to keep up with Amazon. They have moved away from the one thing Amazon can’t offer. Better service.
The box stores have cut their staff back to the point that shopping there is an exercise in frustration. I had to wait 20 mins the other day just to get someone to take my money. They routinely are out of stock of whatever items I seem to need.
After what they did to Parler, I very rarely (almost never) shop at Amazon.
There are advantages to shopping at physical stores, but instead of capitalizing on those advantages, the physical stores try to compete with Amazon on Amazon’s terms.
They try to equal Amazon’s convenience and pricing to the detriment of the one advantage they have: the ability to ask for help from an actual human being, to see and feel the merchandise before purchasing, try things out, make sure they work. In the case of clothes, make sure they fit.
The brick and mortar stores, instead of emphasizing their ability to provide customer service, they’ve cut that service and reduced employee interaction with customers in order to lower prices. You go into a chain retail store these days and you’ll be lucky if you can get an employee to acknowledge your existence, let alone assist you with something. The shelves are typically a mess making it difficult to find what you’re looking for, pricing is unclear or not marked at all and checking out has become a nightmare.
Of course you also have to talk about the quality of the merchandise. One of the reasons Amazon was able to prosper so much is because the big box retailers all started selling substandard merchandise made by virtual slave labor in poor Asian countries. The quality declined steadily until it got to the state we suffer today…everything is just disposable crap. So, when Amazon came online and started selling the same cheap crap even cheaper and more conveniently, what was the incentive to go to a big box store to pay more for the same garbage? When Walmart had a commitment to selling US made goods, they were in their heyday. When Sam died and his successors compromised that policy, Walmart’s decline began in earnest. 20 years ago Walmart was my go-to store. I could get everything from toothpaste to motor oil in one convenient location. Now I’ve probably been in a Walmart once…maybe twice…in the past year. They sell junk, service sucks, the stores are dirty and disorganized, checkout is painful…Walmart is basically the epitome of everything that’s wrong with big box retailers today.
Because of the rampant thievery going on, many popular products are now locked up, but because you can’t find anyone to help you, you can’t get to them. Many times the items you’re looking for are out of stock (stolen?). even when the store’s website says that they have them in stock. Perhaps they have them in the back and just haven’t made it onto the shelves yet, but good luck finding someone to check on that for you.
Most stores have replaced several checkout lanes with “self checkout” areas and then only have maybe one or two regular registers open so if you need assistance with something, you have to wait in a ridiculously long line to check out. Most of the people in the self-checkout lanes can’t figure out how to use the machine so you end up waiting for them to pick up each item, find the barcode, wave the barcode in front of the scanner. Wave the barcode in front of the scanner again. Then the machine beeps and rings up the item twice, so they have to void one of them, which means they then have to wait for an employee (the one who is trying to watch over 10 or 12 self checkout machines) to come enter a code to void the mistaken purchase, then they have to bag all their purchased items in a bagging area that’s too small to work effectively, then dig around in their purse or wallet for their card, then try to figure out how to use the payment machine etc. etc. etc. It takes a person three times as long to check out using a self-checkout machine than it would take for a half-way competent cashier to check them out.
That would be fine if the self-checkouts were just used for people with just a few items, but because there are typically only one or two regular checkout lanes open, the self-checkout is often full of people with carts full of merchandise.
Then, in some cities anyway, you have to navigate the layers of panhandlers and bums hanging out at the entrances of the stores harassing people for their drug and alcohol money. You can complain in the store about it if you can find someone to complain to, but typically it’s against corporate policy for employees to confront the bums and calling the police does nothing because they’ve been defunded and demoralized and don’t have the manpower or ability to even effectively investigate violent crimes, let alone minor things like trespassing and panhandling…if those are even still crimes in that particular city.
So, what’s the draw for a brick and mortar store? Compared to that, I’d much rather sit in my den with my laptop, order the cheap, crappy products I want, and have them delivered to my door a couple of days later.
If brick and mortar stores want to survive, they’ll need to establish a reason for their existence. With the exception of a few of the smaller brands and family owned businesses (which I patronize regularly), they have failed miserably and are paying the price.
Personally, I’m eager for these big box retailers to fail. When they go out of business, hopefully entrepreneurs will recognize the opportunity and fill that space with businesses who recognize that there are plenty of people out there who are willing to pay higher prices when they get good service and a pleasant shopping experience in return. I’d personally much prefer to buy products live and in-person than online, but currently, with the exception of a few family owned specialty stores and smaller retailers, online is the only viable option.
The Amazon model is epic. But there are several startups gunning for Amazon such as myworld, public square and the
innovative tranzact card which offers a 1:1 cash back program program called zbucks which can then be spent in their zclub. Amazon doesn’t pay its vendors for 90 days, while tranzact pays it’s vendors up front to drop ship direct to the consumer. Amazon is predatory by nature stealing products from vendors then offering the same product at a cheaper
version under their amazon essentials label. These business practices will sink them. Public Square is an alliance of mom and pop small businesses that are willing to drop ship. Tranzactcard offers a banking component utilizing small minority banks. These startups will bury Amazon using their own model and fair business practices where everyone wins at a lower price then amazon. I just bought a refrigerator from Lowes. They not only bring it to you, they install it and haul the old one away. Try getting THAT from Amazon!
95% of big box stores became pandemic police. Hope they all go out of business.