How the retail rivalry between Amazon and Walmart forever changed the way we shop

Great rivalries keep you on the edge of your seat.

The Red Sox versus the Yankees, Red Vines versus Twizzlers, Optimus Prime versus Megatron.

Journalist and author Jason Del Rey has been obsessed with one little rivalry between two companies headquartered in cities that couldn’t be more different: Bentonville, Arkansas, and Seattle, Washington.

Maybe you’ve heard of them?

Walmart and Amazon forever changed the way our world shops and consumes, but they’ve gone about conquering the marketplace in very different ways.

Del Rey chronicles the struggle to become the greatest retailer on the planet in his book, “Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets.”

Del Rey covered e-commerce for over a decade with the publication ReCode. When he started that job in 2013, he’d see some stories pop up from time to time about WalMart. But he focused mostly on Amazon.

That is, until something caught his eye.

"In 2016, Walmart made what was to me a very interesting acquisition, which was that they bought a little startup called Jet.com," Del Rey said.

Jet.com was started by an entrepreneur named Marc Lore, who had sold another company to Amazon just six years earlier.

"You have this narrative of this entrepreneur who had been sort of almost crushed by Amazon, kind of forced to sell to them, and now was trying his hand again, and this time sold to their chief retail rival in Walmart," Del Rey explained. "And so, while I've covered Walmart, off and on for years prior to that, I really started to look closely at the rivalry between the two companies then, and examine how it had impacted each other's strategies, tactics and ambitions, over their histories."

2016 signaled a major turning point for both companies. Amazon was about to go all-in on brick-and-mortar retail in a way they never had, and Walmart was investing more resources into ecommerce. Both companies were making major moves to encroach on each other's territories.

And the results for both Amazon and Walmart have been equally mixed.

Listen to the full segment above.