Amazon

Walmart Nation: Mapping America’s Biggest Employers

Published

2 months ago

January 24, 2019

Nick Routley

Tweet361

Share2K

Pin3

2K Shares

Walmart Nation: Mapping America’s Biggest Employers

In America, approximately 150 million people are currently employed, doing everything from neurosurgery to greeting customers at your local Walmart Supercenter.

While there is a breathtaking variety of jobs out there, a few large-scale organizations stand out as the top employer in each state.

The Largest Employer in Each State

The U.S. is the third most populous country in the world, so it takes a lot of manpower to keep the government running. It’ll come as no surprise that, in most states, either the state or federal government is the top employer. California alone employs a quarter of a million federal workers.

New York State is a unique case as NYC’s municipal workforce is the top employer.

Technically, the largest employer on the planet is the U.S. Department of Defense, and in eight states, there are more active military personnel than any single private employer.

Non-Government Employers

When we exclude direct government and military employment, a few trends emerge. Universities and hospitals – there is often some overlap between the two – are top employers in nearly half of the states.

In a handful of cases, the top employer reflects an industry that is well known in the region. General Motors, for example, is still the top employer in Michigan. In Nevada? MGM Resorts International, with over 55,000 employees.

When it comes to large-scale employment, there’s one regional trend that stands out the most – the broad blue expanse of Walmart country.

View the high resolution version of today’s graphic by clicking here.

Walmart Nation

Walmart is the biggest company in the world by revenue, and there are over 3,500 Walmart Supercenters spread around the United States alone. It takes about 1% of private sector workforce in the United States to keep this massive fleet of big box stores running. In Arkansas, that figure jumps up to 4%, with about one-third of the total retail workforce employed at the retail giant.

Here’s a full look at the 21 states where Walmart is the top employer.

State	# of Walmart Employees
Texas	168,403
Florida	107,460
Georgia	60,002
Illinois	53,687
Arkansas	52,367
Ohio	50,186
Virginia	43,623
Missouri	42,029
Tennessee	40,598
Indiana	39,875
Alabama	37,207
Louisiana	36,309
Oklahoma	32,713
South Carolina	32,165
Kentucky	29,554
Mississippi	24,180
Kansas	20,103
West Virginia	11,864
New Hampshire	7,593
Montana	4,861
Wyoming	4,648

What About Amazon?

When we talk about the retail industry, it’s impossible to avoid discussing Amazon. The e-commerce company is growing at an impressive clip, and is now the second largest private employer in the country, with over half a million employees.

That said, even with the acquisition of Whole Foods, Amazon still has a long way to go to catch up to Walmart’s massive employee count. The company’s reliance on contract workers and supply chain automation means that this map is unlikely to turn orange in the near future.

Up Next

Visualizing 200 Years of U.S. Stock Market Sectors

Don't Miss

Mapped: Foreign Direct Investment by Country

Comments

Amazon

Infographic: The Numbers Behind Black Friday

Black Friday is the kickoff to the holiday shopping season – and it often starts it with a bang. See the crazy retail numbers behind the big shopping day.

Published

4 months ago

November 21, 2018

Jeff Desjardins

For American retailers, Christmas comes a month earlier.

Starting in late-November, the holiday shopping season officially kicks into high gear – and it’s the beginning of a month-long stretch that can either make or break retailers.

Black Friday is the shotgun start for this mad scramble of consumerism. And whether you are waiting in line to get a Turbo-Man doll, or you are constantly refreshing your browser window for the latest deal on Amazon, it’s a spectacle all the same.

Black Friday Numbers

Today’s infographic comes to us from AppInstitute, and it breaks down the numbers behind Black Friday, the centerpiece of the shopping extravaganza for retailers in the United States.

The Numbers Behind Black Friday

In totality, the holiday season generated $688 billion of revenue for retailers in the United States in 2017 – and $108.2 billion of this came from online purchases, which are seeing double-digit growth each year.

Impressively, about 15% of all online holiday revenue comes in the four-day span between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The two days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday) are the two highest volume online shopping days of the year.

Shopping Season Retail Breakdowns

Source: Adobe

Online or Offline

Do shoppers take advantage of deals at home or in store?

It appears to be a mix of both, according to comprehensive data from Adobe for the 2017 shopping season:

16% shopped entirely in stores
29% shopped mostly in stores, and a little online
26% shopped equally in stores and online
20% shopped mostly online, and a little in stores
9% shopped entirely online

This means for most people, shopping is an omni-channel experience – they are comparing options in their heads between online (desktop, mobile) and offline channels.

An Even Bigger Day For Online Sales

While Black Friday is an impressive kickoff day for online and offline sales, there is an even bigger one-day online equivalent in China.

On Black Friday, online sales total about $5 billion – this is just a drop in the bucket compared to Alibaba’s Single’s Day, which sold $30.8 billion in a 24-hour period on November 11, 2018.

On Single’s Day in 2018, it took fewer than 90 seconds to hit $1 billion in online sales.

Amazon

Amazon’s Massive Distribution Network in One Giant Visualization

This visualization shows satellite imagery of all of Amazon’s warehouses in the U.S. to put the size of its physical distribution network in perspective.

Published

6 months ago

September 8, 2018

Nick Routley

Amazon’s Massive Distribution Network in One Visualization

View the high resolution version of today’s graphic by clicking here.

Last year, Amazon shipped over 5 billion (with a “B”) Prime packages, and the retail giant’s ecommerce market share in the U.S. is on the verge of surpassing 50%.

Moving that kind of volume takes an impressive amount of technical sophistication, manpower, and distribution infrastructure. While Amazon does lean on third parties for deliveries and warehousing, the company is also building an increasingly expansive distribution network in an attempt to manage the entire process.

Today’s visualization, which uses comprehensive data from MWPVL International, examines the estimated 124 million square feet of active space in the U.S., as well as the 40 million in Amazon’s construction pipeline.

To create our graphical footprint of Amazon’s warehouses in the infographic, we’ve used satellite imagery of every Amazon facility in the U.S. and stitched it all together.

Pieces of the Puzzle

There are a few types of facilities that make up the vast network of Amazon’s warehouses:

Crossdock Centers
Containers from foreign vendors can be held at a crossdock facility until more stock is needed at the fulfillment center. This is the back-end of the distribution chain.

Fulfillment Centers
Fulfillment centers are the most common type of facility in Amazon’s distribution empire, but they serve a wide variety of purposes.

Amazon began building its distribution network in 1997, starting with two fulfillment centers in Seattle and Delaware. The two spaces would be tiny compared to today’s standards at 93,000 and 202,000 square feet, respectively. Now, there is nearly 100 million square feet of active fulfillment center space, with another 35 million on the way.

Sortation Centers
These facilities are responsible for sorting packages by zip code which are then typically delivered to USPS sites. Since being introduced in 2014, sortation centers have allowed Amazon to speed up the delivery process and to help control the distribution process up to “the last mile”.

Delivery Stations
In urban areas, delivery stations are often the last step in the chain before packages reach a customer. Courier companies – and increasingly Amazon Flex drivers – typically handle these short-range deliveries. These stations are often located near airports.

Prime Now Hubs
These smaller locations are specifically designed for speed. Prime Now hubs carry a more limited selection of items – including Whole Foods inventory – that are delivered within two hours of clicking “buy”. There are currently around 50 of these facilities in urban areas around the United States, but that number is expected to increase dramatically in the near future.

Prime Air Hub
Amazon doesn’t own its own airport yet, but the recently announced $1.5B international Prime Air Hub is a step in that direction.

The 210-acre parcels will help Amazon expand its Prime Air fleet while reducing its reliance on companies like UPS and FedEx. Kentucky is a natural choice for the hub as there are already 11 fulfillment centers in the state.

Fighting for the Last Mile

Over the years, Amazon has optimized every aspect of the distribution system, but one final hurdle remains.

Conquering the last mile – the final leg before a package reaches its destination – has proven tricky, in part because USPS already has a well-honed strategy for delivering to all the nation’s residents.

The company’s earnest recruitment drive for Amazon Flex is the latest in a long line of attempts to decrease reliance on third parties for package delivery. Also, by tapping into on-demand labor, Amazon hopes to reduce costs and have more flexibility during volume surges like Black Friday.

This desire to own the entire process is being reflected in the company’s roster of distribution facilities. The massive fulfillment centers aren’t going anywhere, but we may see a lot more smaller delivery hubs in cities and towns across America.