The National Retail Federation’s house publication, STORES, has released its annual Top 100 Retailers report, based on overall 2012 U.S. retail sales. The report dovetails nicely with TWICE’s Top 100 Consumer Electronics Retailers Report, which we published in May and ranks retailers by sales of CE products only. A comparison of the two reports demonstrates the broad footprint CE has on the overall retailing scene.
27 retailers overlap between the two reports, including the largest retailer in the world, Walmart (#1, STORES, #2, TWICE); the top mass merchant, Target (#3, STORES, #5 TWICE); the top pure-play electronics chain, Best Buy (#12, STORES, #1, TWICE); the top warehouse club, Costco (#4, STORES, #6, TWICE); the largest drug store chain, Walgreens (#6, STORES, #68, TWICE); the top home-improvement chain, The Home Depot (#5, STORES, #57, TWICE); and the top e-tailer, Amazon.com (#11 STORES, #3, TWICE).
CE stalwarts including Apple Stores, Staples, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Army-Air Force Exchange, Office Depot, OfficeMax, GameStop and RadioShack also share Top 100 status, among others.
The STORES Top 100 also includes wireless carriers Verizon Wireless and AT&T Wireless, which don’t qualify for the TWICE Top 100 based on their revenues from subscriptions and service, but move a lot of CE hardware in the form of smartphones, tablets and their accessories.
Some interesting bullet points regarding the overall retailing scene from the STORES report include:
- More than 15 years into the dot-com revolution, online transactions account for less than 15 percent of total retail sales.
- Amazon’s share is estimated to be 15.4 percent of the entire e-commerce pie.
- The top 5 large-format brick and mortar retailers — Wal-Mart (which includes Sam’s Club sales), Target, Costco Wholesale, Meijer and BJ’s Wholesale — all of which appear on both reports, collectively generate nearly half a trillion dollars in annual sales. In contrast, Amazon.com and Dell Direct, the pure e-commerce retailers among the Top 100, posted combined U.S. sales of $38.8 billion.
Plenty more interesting nuggets, including STORES’s look at their electronics and entertainment “power players,” can be found here.
You can purchase the TWICE Top 100 CE Retailers Report here.
