Grocery Battle Shifts to Loyalty as Walmart Dominates and Amazon Expands Digital

When it comes to the Amazon-Walmart competition, grocery has become a key battleground. Why? It’s the closest thing U.S. retail has to a weekly subscription. Win the cart, and you earn repeat trips and durable customer habits. That’s why recent consumer-tracking data showing Walmart’s grocery penetration at a record 72% of U.S. households lands as more than a headline. The same tracker says Walmart now serves more than 190 million Americans each month.

That makes for good watercooler talk, but the clearest way to compare Walmart and Amazon in grocery is share of wallet. In the PYMNTS Intelligence Share of Wallet: Amazon vs. Walmart series, Walmart captured 20% of all U.S. dollars spent on food and beverages in Q3 2025. That strength also explains Walmart’s profile: the report estimates food and beverages represent about 60% of Walmart’s total sales. Amazon’s mix is the reverse. Its biggest gains are in discretionary categories, and food and beverages account for only 7% of its retail sales.

Earlier PYMNTS Intelligence work makes the grocery gap concrete. In Q2 2024, Walmart captured 20.2% of consumer spend in food and beverages while Amazon captured 2.7%, which is a roughly 7-to-1 difference.

Amazon’s advantage is digital checkout at scale, so online grocery is a key test. EMARKETER forecasts U.S. grocery eCommerce at $220.48 billion in 2025, with Walmart capturing 31.6% of grocery eCommerce sales and Amazon at 22.6%.

The prize is loyalty as much as margin. Amazon’s response has been to make grocery less about stores and more about speed. In January, Amazon said it will close its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores, convert various locations into Whole Foods Market stores, and open 100+ new Whole Foods locations over the next few years. It also highlighted same-day delivery of perishables and said perishable grocery sales through that service have grown 40x since January 2025.

Still, the structural challenge remains. CFRA analyst Arun Sundaram put it plainly: “Amazon’s biggest Achilles’ heel (for grocery) is they just don’t have a large brick-and-mortar presence.”

Why Walmart’s Grocery Edge Is Sticky

PYMNTS Intelligence research suggests the grocery market remains stubbornly physical: 88% of U.S. grocery shoppers prefer in-person store visits over online options. And when shoppers are standing at the register, the payment mix tilts toward budgeting — debit cards account for 41% of in-store grocery payments, per PYMNTS Intelligence.

That is an advantage for Walmart’s model: thousands of stores that can serve as both the place to browse and the place to pick up. Amazon is building a different kind of proximity — delivery nodes, faster routes and a broader “one cart” experience that combines perishables with general merchandise.

Both companies are using artificial intelligence to make shopping more efficient such as helping customers find items, plan and reorder.

Walmart’s generative AI assistant, “Sparky,” signals how “chat-style” discovery can change baskets. Walmart has said about half of its app users have engaged with Sparky, and management has linked usage to orders that are 35% larger on average. Walmart is also extending AI beyond its app through a partnership with OpenAI aimed at enabling shopping within ChatGPT.

Amazon is applying machine learning to predict local demand as it expands fast delivery — critical in perishables, where the wrong assortment becomes waste. And it is reshaping “intent” features like Lists. Starting March 25, Amazon plans to remove a wish list setting that restricted purchases from third-party sellers, meaning a list owner’s shipping address will be shared with third-party sellers for fulfillment.