We all shop differently today because of AmazonвЂ™s innovations over the past 20 years. If anything, Amazon is contributing to the deflationaryВ forces that have haunted the economy for the better part of the last decade. ItвЂ™s really hard to argue thatвЂ™s the case today. But itвЂ™s clearlyВ notВ a monopoly based on its current market share.В Furthermore, monopoly pricing is associated withВ higherВ prices andВ lessВ competition. At its current rate, it will surpass Walmart in size within the next five to 10 years, and maybe sooner. But Whole FoodsвЂ™ $16 billion in annual sales doesnвЂ™t move the needle much.В Amazon is growing like a weed, of course. My numbers didnвЂ™t include sales for Whole Foods Markets, which Amazon recently agreed to acquire. That distinction still belongs to Walmart, which brought in just shy of half a trillionВ dollars last year, 3.5-times larger than AmazonвЂ™s annual salesвЂ¦ But even then, Amazon makes up just 3.6% of the total.В Amazon isnвЂ™t even the largest retailer in the U.S. Stripping out auto, auto parts, and food services sales, annual retail revenue in the U.S. AmazonвЂ™s $135 billion accounted for a measly 2% of that.В OK, Amazon doesnвЂ™t sell cars or operate restaurants (at least not yet). retail and food services sales last year were over $5.5 trillion. And not all of those revenue dollars are from its online retail business.В AmazonвЂ™s AWS cloud services business accounted for about 10% of its sales, meaning that AmazonвЂ™s retail business brought in closer to $135 billion. Not even close.В LetвЂ™s play with the numbers a little.В Over the trailing 12 months, Amazon has racked up $150 billion in sales. I recently Google searched the term вЂњAmazon monopoly.вЂќ It returned over 4 million results.В Now, a couple of those hits were links to the product page for the Monopoly board game we all grew up playing as kids.В (I was delighted to see thereвЂ™s a Game of ThronesВ edition, complete with a direwolf token and KingвЂ™s Landing as Boardwalk.)В But the majority of the search results were articles about AmazonвЂ™s growing dominance of retail, and its potential threat to competition as a monopoly.ДЄmazon is big, and itвЂ™s getting bigger every day.В But itвЂ™s not a monopoly.

Is amazon a monopoly