ps can lift customer lifetime value and make Prime stickier. The problem is that Walmart’s network is built for this – about 4,600 US stores support pickup and faster delivery, plus Walmart+ reached an estimated 26.5 million members in 2025 (Morgan Stanley).

Why should I care?

For markets: Scale wins when delivery gets expensive.

Last-mile delivery is costly, so retailers that can route orders through nearby stores usually have an edge. Walmart says 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a store, and its recent quarter showed 28% e-commerce growth alongside $177.8 billion in Q3 retail sales. Amazon’s pull is still massive, but its store rethink hints it’s trying to get more fulfillment capacity per location rather than chase store count.

The bigger picture: Retail is becoming logistics first.

Big-box chains and online natives are converging on the same model: stores as mini warehouses. If Amazon can make a smaller set of sites do double duty – shopping plus distribution – it can defend convenience without sinking too much capital into slow-to-scale formats. That discipline matters because Amazon has other growth engines to fund, like Amazon Web Services, a key profit driver even when retail experiments shift.