Additionally, Amazon is a lot more international than Wal-mart
How do you figure? Compare this for Amazon:
Amazon has separate retail websites for United States, United Kingdom & Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India and Mexico.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com
To this for Walmart:
As of January 2014, Walmart's international operations comprised 6,337 stores[1] and 800,000 workers in 26 countries outside the United States.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart
Last time Walmart tried to get a position in germany they just failed outright, nobody accepted the Walmart shopping culture here, not even the employees.
And Walmart is bigger than Amazon in the United States. I don't have numbers at hand of the EU as a whole to compare but I would be surprised if Amazon were bigger than leading grocery store chains.
I am pretty sure the other reailers in Germany like Aldi and Lidl teamed up to prevent Walmart from getting a foothold. They are extremely strong and this for a reason. I went to Walmart in Jena when they opened their shop there and was really underwhelmed by what they had to offer.
Some are virtually entirely based on trade: Singapore. Hong Kong (as an autonomous region of China), etc.
But the comparison was more one of size and scale of operations.
WalMart has an annual income of $482 billion.[1]
That's more than the annual GDP of Poland, as measured by the World Bank, the 25th largest economy in the world, and of Belgium, the Philippines, Thailand, Norway, Iran, Austria, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, South Africa, Hong Kong, Malaysia, ... and 153 other countries (163 total) in the world.[2]
It carries nearly a third of a million distinct products -- 291,000 unique SKUs across all channels, some 100k per store.
It employs 2.2 million people.[4] That's more than Macedonia (#143), but might better be considered as
It has 11,620 stores worldwide. Each is comparable to the business district of a small town, and in many cases is.[5] Wikipedia only lists cities in the US of 100,000 or more population in the United States, there are 304 such.[6] There are a total of 35,000 recognised place names of cities or towns in the US, most quite small.[7]
Of course, that's being a tad unfair to WalMart, perhaps, and the company has all the advantages of modern computers and such which earlier command economies did not have. Clearly, it would be impossible for an early 20th century or earlier command economy to have claimed a significant share of any national economy, let alone the global economy.
Except of course, for the fact that the East India Company which effectively was the corporate state of India, and comprised half the world's trade at the 18th and early 19th centuries.[8] A prime example some Prussian-born economic critic living in England in the 1840s might well have been aware of.
Locally walmart means absolute junk quality for poor people who wait in long lines. The description of Germany is a good fit for retail in general, but not walmart. This truth can't be stated in a commercial publication, walmart spends too much money on advertising, but I think it fairly obvious.
Now Target could have possibly made it. Or maybe walmart could have made it in far southern or eastern Europe in very poor areas.
Frankly, looking at the US map, as a non-american, even there their presence isn't particularly exhaustive. The USA just happens to be a big market.
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