The Big Amazon Rumor

What I think it means for retail

Published in

the decipher

3 min readJan 3, 2018

Early yesterday morning, investing journalist at CNBC published a story about a highly influential tech analyst, Gene Munster, predicting Amazon will buy Target in 2018. Just last year, the internet e-commerce giant company Amazon purchased the upscale grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.4 Billion dollars. The predicted purchase of Target comes at a huge surprise because usually, giant companies like Amazon, don’t make such large acquisitions in a short period of time. However, when you take into consideration Amazon’s highly lucrative business and vastly popular Amazon Echo devices, this all begins to make sense.

But what does Amazon buying Target in 2018 mean for consumers?

Well seeing as this is still all speculation, it could mean nothing. However if this is all true, Amazon could slide right into being the second highest grossing company in retail sales behind Walmart. Allowing for consumers to do mix shopping in nearly 2,300 stores and on Amazon’s current popular e-commerce website, Amazon.com. Let’s not forget the currently use of Same-Day, One-Day, and Two-Day shipping times. For consumers that already love shopping at Target, this is wonderful news.

What does this mean for the competition?

I believe companies such as Walmart and Best Buy will start to see the massive shift towards Amazon’s new agile and fast shipping service as well as in store business. Especially through the holiday season. Again, it may take some time. This sort of acquisition looks like its for the long haul. The future of retail looks to be headed in the direction of mixed online and instore shopping experiences. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales immensely matching each other, as a consumer missing out on deals and missing delivery dates for the holidays will be a lot harder.