June 22, 2011 | Graham

The future of retail Gerry Harvey



I recently asked Gerry Harvey to “phone me” because I had some free advice for him about his campaign against GST free online purchases.

Now I have some more free advice from him sourced from Minyanville, who provided the handy info-graphic at the end of this post.

The graphic compares Amazon and WalMart – two gorillas in the international retail world.

A few things struck me.

  • WalMart is far larger than Amazon
  • Amazon is predicted to be larger than WalMart in 2024, but to be much smaller until the 2020s
  • WalMart is hitting back by going online
  • WalMart is becoming an international bricks and mortar retailer, while Amazon is already an international online retailer

As you can’t take projections 10 or 15 years out too seriously, what this suggests is that WalMart isn’t calling out for teacher to come and see off the intruder, it’s getting out there and looking to match it online and leverage its offline business model in markets where neither have a footprint.

Time some Australian retailers learned this lesson too.

Walmart Vs. Amazon
Via: Online MBA