Burying the lede: "Amazon is still a distant second to the country's largest private employer, Walmart, which employs nearly 1.6 million people in the US, or one out of every 91 workers."
This sort of begs the question on how Walmart is growing.
Actually, the more I think on this claim, the less it makes sense. The xkcd of how many weddings someone will have the day after their marriage comes to mind.
I can't find a graph of Walmart employees over time, which may not be surprising since it seems that they only directly employ about 50k of the cited 1.6M total.
However, the graphs in this article from 2018 make it fairly clear how the trendlines for Walmart vs. Amazon compare:
Assuming the relationship between those curves is still roughly the same, it seems clear that Amazon's employee growth is likely to take it past Walmart's numbers within a couple of years.
Hmmm. I'm torn. At a first instinct, this seems a safe assumption.
However, it is also somewhat safe to say that Amazon's growth has not been cutting in to Walmart, per that article. So what has been shrinking?
That is, assume a somewhat finite pool of shoppers. Since Amazon has grown, and Walmart has remained steady, is Walmart about to start shrinking? Or is there enough of a shopper pool to maintain this growth for Amazon?
Edit: I think it is safe to guess most of the growth came from the death of malls. But my question remains on how large is the pool of shoppers?
