Advertisement for A&P Grocery Stores, 1929. Illustration of woman and boy sitting in car as man loads groceries with Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. store behind and text ‘A &P Established 1859 Where Economy Rules’ from Ladies Home Journal, November 1929. (Photo by Fotosearch/Getty Images).
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On October 15, 2018, Sears Holdings Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Sears had been the largest retailer in the United States for 26 years, from 1964 through 1989.
A few weeks later, Jeff Bezos held an all-hands meeting at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. An employee asked him what he made of the retail landscape, and specifically what he took from the Sears bankruptcy. Bezos did not reassure anyone.
“Amazon is not too big to fail. In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.”
Then the part that matters more:
“If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end. We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”
Doug McMillon, who retired as Walmart's chief executive on January 31 of this year after nearly 12 years, kept a version of the same idea on his phone: an image of the 10 largest US retailers in each decade. Companies at the top of that list do not stay there, and the position has to be earned again every year. Walmart became the largest retailer in America in 1990 and has held the title for 36 consecutive years — McMillon's entire tenure running Sam’s Club, then Walmart International, then the company.
I admire the pragmatic paranoia in both men. But the retail historian in me has never been able to let go of the fact that the chart is wrong, and that the wire story announcing Walmart’s rise in 1991 was wrong in exactly the same way.
Why Was The Chart Wrong?
The 1950, 1960 and 1970 columns on Doug's list include Fortune Brands, Brown Shoe, Hartmarx, Magnavox and S&W Fine Foods — companies that manufactured goods rather than sold them.
That is not carelessness. It is an artifact of the source. Whoever built the chart worked from the Fortune 500, and retailers were not eligible for the Fortune 500 until 1994. The list could not contain the answer, so it returned the closest thing it had.
The cost shows up in what is missing. A&P appears in no column at all — and A&P was the largest retailer in the United States for at least 35 years, and the first retailer anywhere to pass $1 billion in sales, which it did in 1929, at 2.4 times the size of Sears.
Why Did UPI Get It Wrong Too?
When the handover finally happened, UPI broke it on March 8, 1991, with a lede worth the price of admission:
“It was about as conceivable as the Brooklyn Dodgers moving to Los Angeles. But the Dodgers did move, and now Sears is no longer the nation’s largest retailer.”
Then, in the next breath, the error: Sears’ 1990 results “knocks it off the top spot for the first time since 1900 when its catalog sales overtook those of Montgomery Ward.”
Correct about Montgomery Ward. Wrong about the title. Sears did pass Montgomery Ward around the turn of the century and did become America’s largest general merchandiser. It did not become America’s largest retailer until the fiscal year that ended in January 1965, because for the six decades in between, a grocer was bigger. Sears’ reign was 26 years, not 90.
The mistake underneath both is the same one the industry still makes. Each looked only at the companies that resembled its subject. Fortune’s list saw manufacturers. UPI saw the rival department store. Neither looked at food, which was then and remains now the largest thing Americans buy.
Who Was Actually No. 1?
Three companies, and only three, have led American retail in the last century.
A&P held it for at least 35 years — through 1963, and the beginning of its reign is earlier than any sourceable list reaches. Sears held it for 26 years, from 1964 through 1989. Walmart has held it for 36 years, from 1990 through today.
Which produces a fact that ought to be uncomfortable in Bentonville: Walmart has already been No. 1 for a decade longer than Sears ever was.
The handover itself is the best argument Bezos and McMillon have. In 1989 Sears led Walmart by $5.8 billion, a 22% gap. One year later, Walmart’s sales grew 26% while Sears’ grew 1.2%, and Walmart, Kmart and Sears finished within $616 million of each other on a $32 billion base — less than 2%. Walmart went from third to first in a single year, and Sears went from first to third in that same year, according to the three companies’ annual reports.
Sears then took another 28 years to die.
So I rebuilt the chart, from the companies’ own annual reports rather than from a list that excluded them.
List of top 10 retailers in the US every decade
Jason Goldberg
One acknowledgement it produces: Kroger is the only retailer to appear in the top 10 in every decade since 1929. It ranked fourth in 1929. It ranks fourth today.
So Who Is The Largest US Retailer Right Now?
Many readers will be surprised to see Walmart still ahead of Amazon. The honest answer is that in 2026, nobody knows which of them sells more goods to American consumers. Or more precisely, some people probably do know, and they are not saying.
Neither company reports the value of the goods it sells — what the industry calls gross merchandise value, or GMV. They report revenue, and revenue is a different thing, because both operate marketplaces alongside their own retail business. When Amazon makes a first-party sale, the revenue is the full value of the goods. When it makes a third-party sale, the revenue is only the commission, or take rate, that Amazon earns.
That distinction is not a rounding error. Third-party sellers accounted for 61% to 62% of Amazon’s paid units in every quarter of 2025, according to the company’s quarterly earnings releases — and because third-party items carry a higher average selling price than Amazon’s own, the third-party share of GMV is higher still, somewhere around 63% of Amazon’s US sales.
Why Can’t Anyone Size Amazon?
Because the one number you would need is the one nobody publishes.
Credible estimates of Amazon’s 2025 US GMV run from $447.9 billion to $630.6 billion. The whole spread comes down to what you assume Amazon’s blended take rate is, generally somewhere between 25% and 35%. Every five points of assumed take rate moves Amazon’s worldwide GMV by roughly $100 billion.
Summary of estimates fo Amazon and Walmart 2025 US RetaiklGMV
Jason Goldberg
The consequence is that the ranking is not a fact, it is a function of an assumption:
- On the low estimate, Walmart’s US stores alone outsell Amazon.
- In the middle, Amazon is larger than Walmart but smaller than Walmart plus Sam’s Club.
- On the high estimate, Amazon outsells Walmart and Sam’s Club combined.
A word about the number most often quoted in the press. NRF’s Top 100, prepared by Kantar, puts Amazon’s US sales at $293.9 billion. That figure is not wrong so much as not comparable — it is not a GMV number. It also sits well above the measured first-party estimate of roughly $159 billion and far below any GMV estimate, and its method cannot be reproduced from the outside. If you see Amazon and Walmart ranked against each other, check which basis each one is on before you draw a conclusion from the gap.
What Should You Do With This Monday Morning?
Look at who is not on your list.
The Fortune 500 could not see A&P in 1950 because A&P did not fit its definition of a company worth ranking. Today, four of the 12 largest online sellers to American consumers — Temu, SHEIN, TikTok Shop and AliExpress — appear nowhere in NRF’s Top 100, because none of them files with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a US retailer. Temu’s US digital business is larger than Target’s. SHEIN’s is larger than Sam’s Club’s. TikTok Shop grew 68% last year.
If your competitive set is built from a standard ranking, it might have a similar hole in it. The blind spot is never the company you are watching. It is the category you did not think to look at.
It is a virtual certainty that these will not always be the top retailers in America, and that some player nobody is talking enough about today will eventually sit atop the list. TikTok Shop? An AI-native retailer? Whatnot? Something none of us has heard of?
I can’t wait to find out.
