Is Amazon the new Wal-Mart?

Of this I'm certain: staying-home-and-clicking-on-things is the new going-to-an-actual-store. What's not to love Amazon.com, a marketplace that has a seemingly infinite selection, with reduced prices on essentially everything, and doesn't require you to actually look for a darn thing? If you shop there a few times, it even starts telling you what to buy.

Amazon started as a simple online bookstore, but it rapidly expanded and now sells, as far as I can tell, literally everything. Electronics. Diapers. Air horns. Nail polish. Hot sauce. If you can put it in a box, they'll sell it to you. Their inventory isn't limited by the physical constraints that an actual four-walls-and-a-glass-door store has to deal with. And by allowing small retailers (as small as one guy who wants to sell one book) to open marketplaces and sell their used or new stuff through Amazon, they're even encroaching on the territory of internet giants like eBay.

I'd say Amazon has definitely become the Wal-Mart of the internet. But as the New York Times reported this week, Amazon's popularity is also starting to take a toll on stores based in physical reality. That means small retailers--independent bookstores, sports equipment stores, and other specialized retailers--but that's nothing new. Now, Amazon and Wal-Mart are getting into blatant price wars--and Amazon's keeping up.

Given that the two retail realms, let's call them he visceral and the ethereal (get it? Ether-real? Like ethernet? Oh, never mind...), have comparable prices, there are all the obvious reasons of convenience and privacy and selection to sway a shopper toward ethereal retail.

But there's another that isn't getting talked about so much, which is that Wal-Mart just isn't very, you know, classy. People are blaming everything on Wal-Mart these days, from slave labor to soulless capitalism, and it's distinctly untrendy to actually shop there. But somehow Amazon, which relies many of the same business strategies, has escaped the spotlight in most of those tirades.

And besides that, when the increasingly terrifying holiday season rolls around, with Black Friday specials accompanied by twelve-hour queues and occasional tramplings, where would you rather be--here:

 or here:

...?

I'm definitely biased on this subject, but Amazon seems to be in the more promising position here. Before long, Amazon won't be the new Wal-Mart--Wal-Mart will be the old Amazon.