One of the biggest long term risks for Amazon's retail business is that they don't really have a moat. They can beat people logistically, but eventually, other

One of the biggest long term risks for Amazon's retail business is that they don't really have a moat. They can beat people logistically, but eventually, other companies will catch up, and there's probably a diminishing returns effect on money poured into that. They have Amazon Prime, which was probably created to try to be a moat, but I think they've had more difficulty making that a moat over the long term than they may have initially hoped. Why would I pay for faster shipping if Wal-Mart pretty much offers it by default? Tacking on a lot of mediocre streaming services is a weird way to add value to that. (AWS has a lock-in moat. Once you're in, you will find it harder and harder to leave over time. True of all the clouds, but that plays in favor of the biggest which at the moment AWS is.) If you look, you can kinda see a lot of flailing on Amazon's part over the past several years trying to figure out how to build a moat around their retail in a lot of ways; Amazon Basics, various games around Prime, trying to convince people to buy retail through Alexa which is hard-coded to Amazon, of course, etc. Almost everything the retail side is doing amounts to that in the end.