America’s three biggest retailers—Amazon, Walmart, and Costco—are hybrid retailers, mixing online and, since Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market, brick-and-mortar stores. In many ways they are also tech companies. Certainly Amazon is, as a major portion of its revenue comes from providing backbone web services through its Amazon cloud. It is also hugely profitable, as well as diversified. Founder Jeff Bezos, now the richest person in the world with a net worth of $120.2 B, recently purchased the Washington Post newspaper. This is viewed by some as a godsend and by others as a peculiar reach into the news business that may be more motivated by an interest in data collection and political influence than in maintaining a free press ("Profile--Jeff Bezos", 2018). …show more content…
Apple did that in 2016, ending the separation between Apple stores and Apple.com. In ear-ly 2017, Walmart announced a leadership shuffle that will further integrate recently purchased Jet.com into it’s overall e-commerce business. Marc Lore now leads Walmart’s e-commerce di-vision. His appointment is notable because he brings tech experience as well as retailing back-ground to Walmart. He founded diapers.com and eventually sold it to Amazon for $550 million. Walmart also named a new chief technology officer to oversee both its online and brick-and-mortar tech functions. All of this is designed, according to an interview with Lore, to make Walmart more competitive with Amazon ("Walmart's leadership expands executive roles in online push", 2017). In this scheme, Lore is in the leadership role and the tech officer a manager role, although as noted previously, both roles