Net to come

Customers coming in and out a Walmart storefront in the year 2000.

James Leynse/Getty Images

Editor’s note: We’re rerunning stories this week from our yearlong Quarter Century Project, in which we examined the last 25 years in retail.

In 1999, three years before reaching the top of the Fortune 500, Walmart operated nearly 4,000 stores globally and generated $137.6 billion in net sales. But for all its size and might, its online presence was just getting its sea legs. Despite efforts by certain executives to prioritize digital—detailed in Jason Del Rey’s 2023 book Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets—Walmart mainly focused on its brick-and-mortar business throughout the 1990s.

The January 1996 edition of the company’s in-house newsletter provides a window into its thinking at the time: “The internet—it’s one of the hottest computer buzzwords to come along in years…It could be the next VCR or the next pet rock.”

That same newsletter explained that Walmart had a homepage where customers could see job openings and “what’s hot in the latest Walmart circular,” but it wasn’t until 2000 that the company made the leap into online shopping with the launch of Walmart.com.

Del Rey told Retail Brew that marking 2000 as the starting date of Walmart’s e-commerce journey is “a bit revisionist” given the nascent efforts to get it off the ground in the mid- to late 1990s, but acknowledged that the really consequential moves didn’t come until the 2010s.

How then did Walmart become the e-commerce giant it is today, with online sales growing more than four times as fast as sales from physical stores? The answer is a winding 25-year journey involving spin-offs, acquisitions, and some very public strategic pivots from top brass that together nudged the retail giant into the future.

Keep reading here.—AV

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Prime flies

Items in "Amazon Prime" branded packaging are seen at the Amazon Fulfillment Centre on November 13, 2018. Credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Nurphoto/Getty Images

In 2005, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told the New York Times that its newly released Prime membership program was among the company’s consumer-focused innovations “that wonʼt pay off for years.”

In many ways, Bezos was right. Amazon Prime, introduced in February 2005, was a $79 annual membership program (which now costs $139 per year) that offered shoppers unlimited, express two-day shipping. Amazon took its time to get the service off the ground. As Amazon expanded beyond shipping to include services like Prime Video, the Prime membership program gained significant momentum with consumers. And, 20 years later, Amazon Prime is a household name and generates at least $40 billion in revenue.

Amazon identified a white space within logistics at a time when shipping costs were a significant barrier to early e-commerce adoption. And despite rivals underestimating Amazonʼs impact, competitors have struggled to adapt to the new world order set by Amazon in e-commerce.

Keep reading here.—VC

RETAIL

Try it on for size

Kara Richardson Whitely observes a video with a thin model in a display window at an H&M in the American Dream Mall in New Jersey.

Andrew Adam Newman

We asked our reporters, who play so well with others, to choose a favorite story from 2025 by a Retail Brew colleague.

As evidenced by my favorite Andrew Adam Newman story last year, Andy loves to get his boots on the ground.

And earlier this year, he marched them to New Jersey’s American Dream Mall, where he accompanied Kara Richardson Whitely, CEO of The Gorgeous Agency, which helps retail brands address the plus-sized market, on a shopping trip to find an outfit for an upcoming conference.

As a plus-sized woman—encompassing size 14 and up, a market worth $40 billion, she estimated—Richardson Whitely hates in-person shopping. Visiting several stores that had previously touted in-store availability of extended sizes, Whitely showed Andy one reason for her dread, encapsulated in this exchange with a Lululemon associate:

“Excuse me,” she said. “What size leggings do you carry in the store?”

“What size are you looking for?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty we don’t carry unfortunately. The highest we carry is a 14.”

“A size 14. Thanks, do you carry anything else in a 20?”

“No. Actually, we used to, I don’t know why we don’t anymore.”

Then another employee who’d said that she thought there might be a couple items on the sale rack, the result of the company encouraging online returns to stores, checked and apologized that it was just one pair of leggings, and it was a size 18—way too small.

“When you’re making a promise to a customer that you’re going to have plus sizes, you have to carry through,” Richardson Whitely told me as we were leaving the store. “That was a rejection. I want to spend money there, right? And I can’t.”

Andy’s chronicle of Richardson Whitely’s fruitless shopping trip presented an unfortunate reality for plus-sized shoppers—and a call to action for retailers.

Read the original story: I went to a mall with a plus-sized retail consultant. Now I know why she dreads shopping.—EC

SWAPPING SKUS

Some retail reads from our sibling Brews.

Under where?: The odd picture that Ulta Beauty and Victoria’s Secret earnings helped paint in December. (CFO Brew)

Import in the storm: In April, L.L. Bean brought its Japan Collection, originally designed exclusively for the Japanese market, to the US. (Marketing Brew)

Food for thought: Why fast-casual chain Cava invested in Chipotle-backed Hyphen. (Revenue Brew)

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