Predictions are Hard: The Four

I recently picked up Scott Galloway's The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google which was first published in the fall of 2017. The world can change fast, and seven years later the chapter on Amazon felt surprisingly out of date.

Back in 2017, Galloway painted a scary picture of Amazon Go as an impending threat to all cashiers:

With the announcement of Amazon Go, a cashier-less convenience store, the firm entered the brick-and-mortar business. But with a twist: customers at the first Amazon Go groceries-and-goods stores can simply buy items by walking out of the store. Sensors scan your bags, and your app, as you walk out. There's no checkout.
 
Other retailers ... are now scrambling to eliminate their own checkout processes. Whom does this latest Amazon maneuver put at risk? The 3.4 million Americans (2.6 percent of the U.S. workforce) employed as cashiers.

We now know that Amazon Go turned out to mostly be an AI flop. Amazon closed several of its cashier-free stores in 2023 and more in 2024. Amazon Fresh stores have stopped using the "Just Walk Out" technology because of its high failure rate. Years into the project, 70% of transactions still required human intervention. The machines weren't learning. Amazon had over 1,000 Indian workers manually reviewing checkout images.

Undoubtedly, online retail and simpler forms of automated checkout will continue to replace human cashiers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects an 11% decline in the next decade. But so far there hasn't been a major shift caused by AI-based checkout systems. Nine years after Amazon Go was announced, the US still has 3.3 million cashier jobs.

Later in the chapter, Galloway discussed which economic sectors were soon to lose to Amazon:

Retail is a much, much bigger business than media or telco, and Amazon's triumph will mean a lot of losers—not just individual companies, but entire industry sectors.
 
Obviously, grocery is one of those doomed sectors.

He argued that online and cashier-less grocery shopping would beat the existing grocery experience. And he noted that Kroger's stock was down 9% on the day Amazon announced its plans to acquire Whole Foods back in June 2017. But, today, Kroger is doing fine. Instead of being doomed, their stock is up 209% since that 2017 drop. And just this month they announced plans to hire 15k workers.

Galloway forecasted that Walmart was the company most threatened by Amazon:

The biggest loser? Easy: Walmart.

Among other things, he points out that in the US, "Walmart's share of online sales in 2017 was 1.9 percent, while Amazon's was 36.2 percent." In recent years, Walmart has been gaining ground and has more than tripled their market share. Statista estimates that in 2023 Walmart's share of US online sales was 6.4% and Amazon's was 37.6%.

Walmart is also the top grocer in the US by a significant margin, followed by Kroger and Costco. Amazon has struggled to compete in groceries.

Galloway also predicted:

That is why Amazon will be the first $1 trillion market cap company.

But in 2018, that achievement went to a different member of the Four: Apple.

Apple became the first publicly traded US company to reach $1 trillion. Amazon first tipped over $1 trillion a month later and both are now multi-trillion dollar companies, but Apple continued to grow faster and beat Amazon to the $2 trillion mark. In 2022, Apple was the first to $3 trillion, which is still well beyond Amazon's worth today in 2025.

None of this is to say that Amazon hasn't still been wildly successful. Just that it isn't invincible, it can have ideas that flop, and its competitors have remained strong.

Predictions are hard. It's easy to get caught up in hype and doom. This is why I like to dip into books from the recent past to help keep perspective.

---