When I was born, my parents shopped for groceries at the A&P around the corner from their apartment in Flushing.

Down Northern Boulevard was a Sears catalog store, at which they could order what they couldn’t get otherwise, particularly tools.

On Main Street was F.W. Woolworth’s, where they went for things they wanted to get cheaply.

All three of those retailers were dominant institutions, with origins in the 19th century. None of them exist in anywhere near that form in 2024.

Instead, the world’s largest retailer now was doing business in 1954 as a single Woolworth’s-type five-and-dime in Bentonville, Arkansas.

It wasn’t until 1962 that Sam and Bud Walton opened the first Wal-Mart in Rogers, Arkansas. Not only did Wal-Mart overtake every other retailer – food or otherwise – in the world, it is now the largest company of any kind by revenue, taking in $611.3 billion in its most recent fiscal year. That’s $8 billion more than the Saudi oil company, Aramco.

Wal-Mart, with its smiley face logo, achieved success in part by staying away from places like New York. They built massive stores that carried everything anyone would need on cheap real estate away from center cities. The volume of these stores and paying low wages to work in them helped drive down prices.

The biggest retail challenger to Wal-Mart is online – and I’ve taken the liberty of asking “someone” else to write the next part.

Alexa, tell me the history of Amazon.

“Amazon was founded in Jeff Bezos’ garage in 1995. While the company originally only sold books, it’s become one of the world’s largest online retailers.” 

That’s an understatement.

Amazon is so ubiquitous that I’d wager you saw one of its gray trucks with the blue smile swirl at some point today. And its power is not limited to retailing.

Go on, Alexa.

“A couple of Amazon’s best (ED: Alexa’s word, not mine) innovations include the 2002 launch of Amazon Web Services and the 2007 launch of the Kindle. More recently, the 2010 creation of Amazon Studios offers Prime members award-winning original series and films.”

Not only has Amazon bigfooted other retailers, it has created products that it can sell and then pay itself for. That includes…

“In 2014, the company launched its first smart speaker, the Amazon Echo, featuring its Alexa assistant.”

The dominance of Wal-Mart and Amazon (you can throw in Target for the discerning) has given consumers experiences they couldn’t imagine in the checkout line at A&P. A new novel can be at your door a day after your order it. Groceries show up whenever you need them.

This is not, however, an unmitigated blessing. In fact, there are those of you who bemoan all of this.

And there’s an argument to be made. Amazon and Wal-Mart bear some responsibility for the glut of empty store space in this country. They have limited the idea of shopping in a town or village to boutique stores in touristy places. Their demands on their workforce has made being in their employ seem to be only for the desperate.

They seem like monoliths – the futuristic Buy n Large of the Pixar film “Wall-E” or Engulf & Devour of Mel Brooks’ 1976 comedy “Silent Movie.”

But 70 years ago, Sears and A&P and Woolworth seemed unbreakable, too. Now Sears has a few stores in California, Woolworth’s has morphed into Foot Locker and the only thing left of A&P is the Eight O’Clock Coffee brand that some company bought.

Hard to imagine for Wal-Mart and Amazon. But obviously not impossible.