Who runs US retail

The National Retail Federation ranks retailers by US retail sales - not total company revenue, so Amazon's cloud business and Walmart's overseas stores are both left out. Here is 2025:

1 Walmart - $576.0bn 2 Amazon - $293.9bn 3 Costco - $198.7bn 4 Kroger - $154.7bn 5 Home Depot - $141.1bn 6 CVS - $139.4bn 7 Walgreens - $112.1bn 8 Target - $102.7bn

Twelve years earlier the same eight ranked in almost the opposite order at the bottom: Walmart first, Kroger second, Costco third, Target fourth, Home Depot fifth, Walgreens sixth, CVS seventh - and Amazon last of them, at $44.0bn. On NRF's full 2013 list Amazon was ninth overall, with Lowe's eighth.

So the movement is almost entirely one company. Amazon multiplied its US retail sales by nearly seven and climbed seven places on NRF's full list. Everybody else shuffled by a place or two, except Target, which fell from fourth to eighth.

And the number that surprises people: Walmart is still nearly twice Amazon's size in the US, and it added $242bn of US sales over the same twelve years - more than five times Amazon's entire 2013 business. Being overtaken and being caught are different things.

One note on the chart: it takes today's top eight and ranks those same eight against each other in both years, so the numbers are their order within this group, not their place on the full NRF list. Lowe's is the company that does not appear - it was eighth in 2013 and is ninth today. Kroger is shown with its pre-2019 oval logo.