
A New Era For Retail Giants: Who's Winning in 2025?
August 21, 2025
Key Takeaways From the Report:
- The hypergrowth of Costco, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General between 2019 and 2025 has fundamentally changed the brick-and-mortar retail landscape.
- Overall visits to Target and Walmart have remained essentially stable even as traffic to the new retail giants skyrocketed – so the increased competition is not necessarily coming at legacy giants' expense. Instead, each retail giant is filling a different need, and success now requires excelling at specific shopping missions rather than broad market dominance.
- Cross-shopping has become the new normal, with Walmart and Target maintaining their popularity even as their relative visit shares decline, creating opportunities for complementary rather than purely competitive strategies.
- Dollar stores are rapidly graduating from "fill-in" destinations to primary shopping locations, signaling a fundamental shift in how Americans approach everyday retail.
- Walmart still enjoys the highest visit frequency, but the other four chains – and especially Dollar General – are gaining ground in this realm.
- Geographic and demographic specialization is becoming the key differentiator, as each chain carves out distinct niches rather than competing head-to-head across all markets and customer segments.