Research from pymnts.com has examined how much of the USA consumer spend and retail is going to Amazon and the results are fascinating. They reckon that os all the dollars pent in the USA by households is equal to 2.1% of the total.
Based on detailed analysis by the PYMNTS research group, we estimated that Amazon now accounts for 2.1 percent of all consumer spend — some $1,320 of the total paycheck for a household that earns roughly $63,000 a year ($62,941, to be precise). We estimated average annual consumer spending for 2018 based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2014 to 2017.
-pymnts
It’s worth noting that all consumer spending is exactly that and is everything that is spent. They have also researched the share of retail that Amazon is currently grabbing in the USA and they estimate that to be 6.4%. You can read more and see the charts here. This is based on the $19,556 a typical American household spends on retail, which is something like $1,243 annually based on official figures from the US government.
Whilst these are truly remarkable figures that ably demonstrate that there is still a huge amount of space for Amazon to grow into. Amazon does seem to have ambitions for complete world domination and, even just this year, has significantly developed its infrastructure in the United States, as well as elsewhere.
And that, in part, explains the Amazon zeal to expand into other verticals and categories, pharmaceuticals being one such lucrative market area. And it also explains the Amazon passion for expansion in India: imagine how lucrative such a share will be there in the future.
But isn’t there also an aspect of this that is rather scary? Having a single organisation wielding so much power in global retail is potentially very dangerous and doubtless undesirable in the long run. It would be interesting to know what the UK total Amazon share of retail and consumer spend is in 2018.
