Editor’s Note: The video and article by Epic Economist does a good job of focusing on the economic challenges companies like Amazon are facing, but we cannot dismiss the sentiment of many American consumers regarding “wokeness.” This isn’t just about a bad economy or inflation. More Americans are rightly turning to companies both local and larger that have not embraced ESG ideology or DEI policies. This trend needs to continue. It needs to grow. With that said, here’s the Epic Economist…
The nightmare in the retail sector never seems to end, and now Amazon, the second largest online and physical retailer in the world, is giving up on its brick-and-mortar operations, according to a new report and warnings issued by the company’s CEO Andy Jassy.
Its stores continue to disappear amid the most dramatic shift the industry has ever experienced, and the problems faced by the retail giant are scaring the living daylights out of its rivals, which have a smaller market share and bigger liabilities that could rapidly throw them over the edge.
At this point, some of America’s largest brands have already started taking extreme measures to protect their businesses as they get ready for a perfect storm that is threatening to spark the most devastating wave of bankruptcies recorded since 2017. For many of our beloved retailers, this is the beginning of the end.
Amazon recently published an annual letter to its shareholders saying that its service division, a huge part of its business that generates roughly $62 billion in revenue every year, is facing a series of headwinds that are forcing the company to cut costs on other divisions, including brick-and-mortar retail, in order to focus on profitability as executives prepare for a prolonged recession.
Since Jassy took over as CEO, Amazon’s stock crashed by 44%. On Friday, the company’s shares fell again wiping out gains from the previous week after the gloomy forecast about future growth and tighter spending was shared by the executive.
He launched one of the deepest austerity plans the retailer has ever known, ending several projects, killing certain services and products, and on top of all else, cutting almost 30,000 jobs in just a few months. According to a report by The Street, Amazon is now giving up on the majority of its brick-and-mortar businesses after years of trying to expand its physical operations across the country and the world.
With the exception of Whole Foods stores, all of its grocery stores are in the process of being shut down in 2023, a trend that started last year, with the closure of several underperforming Fresh and Go stores.
Although these cuts may help Amazon’s bottom line in the next few quarters, the overall financial losses caused by the shutdowns will ultimately hurt the retailer in the long run. In addition, all of its remaining physical bookstores, gadget, and electronic stores are being shuttered, not only in America, but all over the globe, including 68 locations in the U.K.
The demise of Amazon’s physical stores comes at a time when other major retailers are coping with lagging sales, changing consumer habits, and rolling out their recession playbook to weather the perfect storm that is on the horizon.
Deteriorating conditions for businesses mean that even some of the biggest players out there are endangered. Sadly, we may lose our favorite stores and we may have to say goodbye to several of the brands that stayed with us for decades. This is just the start of a much bigger crisis that will force more and more retailers to rethink their entire operations. And by the end of this process, America’s retail landscape will be vastly different than what it looks like right now.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Water still wet, dudes!
Great article on the BLATANTLY OBVIOUS and of course Amazon is faring poorly since it’s RETAIL, and since the wars on small business in both America and China have been highly successful and since Amazon is the #1 distributor for China in North America!
I find it impossible to feel any pain for Amazon. They dominate the market and have a political stance which has no respect for American freedom or foundational Constitutional rights.