How Amazon, Walmart And Home Depot Go Beyond

New Multi-Hyphens

Walmart has over 4,600 stores in the United States, and 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart or Sam’s Club. At that level of saturation, continued growth has to come from somewhere other than opening more stores. Although the giant has done an excellent job at growing its ecommerce sales and solidifying its power as an omnichannel player, retail media is a key focus moving forward. Revenue from Walmart’s advertising division, Walmart Connect, hit $6.4 billion last fiscal year, growing 46%.

Amazon faces a version of the same ceiling. Amazon’s annual ad revenue hit $68 billion in fiscal 2025, growing 22%. It also holds about a 37.6% share of e-commerce sales. It has tried to expand into physical stores through acquisitions like Whole Foods as well as several store concepts of its own that did not survive. Amazon Go, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Style, and Amazon Books have all been scaled back or exited. Its real growth has instead come largely from separate enterprises built alongside its retail vertical rather than inside it. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Fulfillment Services (AFS) are prime examples of this.

AWS generated $128.7 billion in revenue in 2025, growing 20% year-over-year and equating to 57% of Amazon’s operating profit. ASCS is an expansion to capitalize on the logistics network with AFS established to compete with UPS and FedEx. When Amazon announced the opening of its freight, distribution, fulfillment, and parcel shipping services to other businesses, regardless of whether they sell on Amazon, UPS and FedEx stock dropped. Wayfair, with Castlegate, Shein, with its manufacturing network, and Beyond, with its stated goal of being the ‘everything home company’ are each trying to replicate the success of these models.

Gap, Sephora, and Home Depot also seem to have observed similar signals, though aimed at a different layer of the business. Rather than continuing to route influencer marketing through LTK, each has built its own platform for creator storefronts. By building a discovery layer directly into their business, they hold onto the customer relationship and own the valuable data that comes with it.

The Single Hyphen

The single-hyphen is not dead. There are still real innovations and experiments happening in more familiar categories of retail extension such as experiential retail, vertical and horizontal acquisitions, and store-within-a-store (SWAS) concepts.

In experiential retail, coffee shops continue to serve, from Ralph’s Coffee to the newer Coach Coffee Shop. New SWAS partnerships are being explored as well. IKEA now operates shop-in-shops inside select Best Buy locations, and Best Buy has reciprocated with consultation spaces inside IKEA stores. Despite the failed partnership with Ulta, Target has a new partnership with Warby Parker shops in select locations. Home Depot has been aggressive with vertical acquisitions to strengthen its supply chain, buying up suppliers and service providers that serve its core contractor customers. It acquired SRS Distribution, GMS, and Mingledorff’s. Walmart and Dillard’s made horizontal moves of a different kind, both acquiring shopping malls.

The Risk Of All Things

The risk of being all things to all people is of course real, and it has already shown up in this industry more than once.

Walmart’s attempt to take on streaming services through its Vudu acquisition, and its more recent retreat from Walmart Health, are both examples of a retailer biting off more than it can chew. Having failed with Vudu in the past, Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio and Vibe.co are its second chance to own the screen.

Walmart is not alone in costly lessons. CVS committed $10.6 billion to acquire Oak Street Health, betting that owning primary care clinics would deepen its hold on the same customer who already filled prescriptions at its stores. Walgreens committed more than $8.7 billion for a majority stake in VillageMD, and a subsequent acquisition of Summit Health. Both companies have since pulled back, weighed down by reimbursement structures and operating costs that have little in common with running a pharmacy. Although these appeared to be synergistic acquisitions, the cost structures, regulatory exposure, and margin profile showed otherwise.

The difference in these failures from the current bets is the health of the overall business and supporting structure. Whether the core business has a bridge to support the new business is critical. With Vudu, Walmart acquired a streaming platform without having first developed its own retail media network. CVS and Walgreens are still working through fundamental issues in their own pharmacy and insurance businesses, the foundation their healthcare expansion was supposed to sit on top of. Before extending capabilities, data, scale, or logistics, the core business needs to be stable.

Hunger For Margin

Retail’s new hyphenated revenue models, which include retail media, marketplace fees, logistics and sourcing services, and financial products, already accounted for 15% of sales and 25% of profits in 2024. That share could approach half of industry profits by 2030. These moves also reinforce where margin in retail is going. With giants like Amazon and Walmart expanding further, making announcements within weeks of each other, these figures show no signs of slowing down.

Diversification of revenue streams is also a safeguard. A retailer that controls its own logistics, advertising, and discovery layer answers to no one else’s outage, price hike, or policy change. It is also better positioned to leverage its scale. A store can no longer be just a store, and thus needs to become an omnivore. Control will matter more than size. Before consuming a business, it is however important to make sure that it fits your diet.