Why’s that frightening? Over the last 20 years they’ve disrupted a bunch of incumbents through better customer experience and ruthless execution. I think Amazon’s lack of clear moral position on key issues is concerning (and potentially frightening) and I’d actually argue that Wal-Mart has been much more clear on where they stand on things, but I’m curious if you simply think a company disrupting a major industry is scary beyond simply change happening “quickly”.

It's not quite _all_ retail though. The author excluded market segments that Amazon doesn't participate in - cars, gasoline, etc

Retailers of that size - vs domestic retail share - are common globally among developed nations because the economy of scale is required to compete.

The alternative in a global economy would be to shut down access to your market to keep the foreign retail giants out. Otherwise they would come in and decimate your smaller, less competitive retailers.

It's why just two grocers (E.Leclerc, Carrefour) in France have 40% of their grocery market. Throw in three other retail companies like Auchan Holding and you have total retail dominance by just a few players.

It's why Schwarz Group and Aldi are so large in Germany and why Tesco has total sales equal to ~12% of all retail spending in the UK (domestically they're larger as a % than Amazon is in the US for example). If you scaled Tesco up, UK economy scaled to the US economy, they'd be larger than Walmart.

And yet it still pales in comparison to Walmart.

Why is this frightening?

It seems to me only shows that online shopping is just a fraction of US's retail market, with the largest player only takes up 5%.

This places them a distant second to Walmart's 9% share of all consumer retail sales.