Is Amazon the new Walmart ?

[JNA]

AIB Upstate NY Cyburbian

Amazon’s Jungle Logic

Amazon was encouraging customers to go into brick-and-mortar bookstores on Saturday, and use its price-check app (which allows shoppers in physical stores to see, by scanning a bar code, if they can get a better price online) to earn a 5 percent credit on Amazon purchases

Amazon is the latest of many online retailers, including Gilt and HSN, that are using mobile apps to poach shoppers from physical stores

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/1...t/?ref=opinion

[Tarf]

Amazon will never be the new Walmart - not until they plaster their front page with images of the fattest, ugliest, scariest people in the country.

I still don't understand why Walmart is that way but Target isn't... but it is what it is. I've been in a Walmart once in my life - first and last time.

[Cardinal]

Walmart's origins were largely rural and southern while Target was mainly suburban and northern. Walmart has emphasized low prices while Target has emphasized quality at a value price. Honestly, Walmarts differ considerably in their appearance and the vibe the emit. Some come off pretty well while others are really questionable. The same goes for other retail chains, but perhaps because Walmart is so big, we are more likely to notice it.

To those who watch, Walmart has stumbled in recent years. They will ultimately prove as infallible as Montgomery Wards and Woolworths, two of the other chains who were once the target of criticism for their impact on the retail scene. Wards came on the scene as a catalog operation before it had physical stores, and critics also said that it killed off local retailers. A hundred years later it was Walmart. How funny if they should be supplanted once again by a "catalog" - this time on the internets.