Winner Sells All

A riveting history of Amazon’s rise, and Walmart’s desperate battle to stave off extinction and reclaim its crown as the king of everything retail.

For years, Walmart and Amazon operated in separate spheres—one a massive brick-and-mortar retailer, the other an online giant. But in 2016, Walmart aggressively moved into the world of e-commerce, while Amazon made big bets in physical retail. The resulting rivalry is a no-holds-barred power struggle for dominance as Amazon’s ambition continues to grow and Walmart’s homegrown CEO tries to lead a business reinvention for the ages.

Along the way, retail has experienced an unprecedented shift accelerated by the Covid pandemic. Customers moved more of their purchases online and began expecting more convenience from physical retailers, while mom-and-pop stores and once-prominent chains alike were being wiped out or forced to do business with industry giants. Amazon and Walmart reaped the rewards. But as the two mega-corporations have consolidated retail power, dangerous consequences have also emerged--for consumers and small merchants facing fewer buying and selling options, and millions of workers paid meager wages for demanding and sometimes dangerous work. 

This is a tale of ego, revenge, and big money moves, with legendary executives and fearless entrepreneurs battling to invent the future and cement their own legacies -- sometimes between rival companies and sometimes within the same company walls. Jason Del Rey chronicles the defining business clash of this generation—a war waged for our loyalty and wallets, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and millions of jobs on the line. As both companies continue to expand their respective empires into new susceptible industries, Winner Takes All is the key to understanding how they are changing the way we shop, live, and work—for decades to come.