While the wider retail sector both in the US and the UK has been battered by coronavirus, the pandemic has done nothing to halt the inexorable rise of Amazon. In fact, it has only served to help Amazon grow ever larger. 

As a result, the news this week that it was in discussions with America’s largest shopping centre landlord, Simon Property Group, about the possibility of buying up abandoned former JC Penney and Sears department stores to turn them into tech-laden distribution centres makes sense. 

In the US, as in the UK, months of intermittent lockdowns have seen more people come to rely on ecommerce more of the time, helping to drive as much as five years’ worth of sales growth for the channel in five months.