Where Americans Spend their Trillions on Goods and How that Changed since 2015

Big structural changes in spending patterns created winners and losers.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

Americans spent $8.7 trillion over the past 12 months at brick-and-mortar stores and at online retailers to purchase all kinds of goods, from shoes and groceries to RVs and cannabis – up by 3.6% from the same period a year earlier, according to the retail sales data from the Census Bureau today. But how are consumers spreading these trillions around among the retailers? How has it changed since 2015? And among those retailers, who are the winners and losers?

The winner is ecommerce: 250% growth since 2015. Sales in January by “nonstore retailers” hit a record three-month average of $131 billion. And their share of total retail sales nearly doubled to 17.5%, up from 8.9% in 2015, and up from a share of 5.4% in 2003, when retailers such as Walmart were still blowing off ecommerce; that newfangled thing would never threaten their brick-and-mortar business.

But a few years later, Walmart saw it coming, and it threw its entire corporate weight behind ecommerce (and groceries), and today Walmart is the second-largest ecommerce retailer behind Amazon, and its ecommerce sales count as ecommerce sales (and it’s the largest grocery store). The rest of the stuff in its aisles, meh.

In 2020, ecommerce became the #2 retailer category behind motor-vehicle and parts dealers, up from #5 or #6 in 2015 (dotted red line in the chart). And it’s closing in on motor vehicle dealers.

Ecommerce has structurally changed how Americans shop, and Americans are not backing off. It is even making headway into grocery sales, which many people said would never happen.

Restaurants and bars are the other big winner: 105% growth since 2015. Their share of total retail sales doubled to 13.6% from 6.8% in 2015. Sales rose to a record $100 billion three-month average in January (purple line in the chart).

Americans love to eat and drink out at “food services and drinking places,” as they’re called. And they’re doing more and more of it. This is largely discretionary spending that people do because they want to, not because they have to.

Sales of restaurants and bars surpassed sales at general merchandise stores and sales at food and beverage stores before the pandemic and became the #3 retailer category. During the lockdowns, they got crushed more than any other category, but then came roaring back.

Nevertheless, they’re still losing share to ecommerce. Nothing can keep up with the momentum of ecommerce.

Motor vehicles and parts dealers are still #1 in retail sales but are getting reeled in by ecommerce (black line in the chart). They sell new and used vehicles, recreational vehicles, motorcycles, ATVs, snowmobiles, other motor vehicles, boats, tires, and parts.

Their sales rose by 61% since 2015, but that was less than overall retail sales (+71%), and their share eased to 19.0% (top black line in the chart).

These top three retailer categories – motor vehicle and parts dealers, ecommerce, and restaurants and bars – accounted for 50.3% of total retail sales.

As total retail sales increased by 71% since 2015, the retailer categories that increases by less than 71% lost share. The ones that increased by more than 71% since 2015 gained share; there were only three:

Ecommerce: +250%
Restaurants & bars + 105%
retailers (includes cannabis retailers): +77%

The gains of the first two – ecommerce and restaurants & bars – are the result of big structural changes in how Americans spend their money and what they spend it on. The third was a result of the increasing legalization of cannabis retailers in more and more states.

All other retailer categories lost share.

Food and beverage stores, the #2 category in 2017 and 2018, dropped to #4 in 2022 and gave up more share since then (double green line in the chart above).

Since 2015, their sales increased by 51%, substantially below retail sales.

Some of those sales have wandered off to “general merchandise” retailers like Walmart, and some sales have wandered off to ecommerce, and they’re counted in those categories. And some of the sales have wandered off to restaurants as people eat out more often.

Here is how food & beverage store sales (blue) duked it out with restaurant & bar sales (red).

Gas station sales, the #6 category (blue in the first chart), rose by only 22% since 2015, way below the increase of total retail sales of 71% over the same period. But that increase, as small as it was, was driven entirely by the price increase of gasoline.

Gasoline consumption, measured in millions of barrels per day, fell in 2025 compared to 2015, and has been on a long-term structural decline I discussed and illustrated here.

Department stores are the biggest losers (brown line at the very bottom of the first chart). They have been crushed by bankruptcies, first the independent local stores and regional chains, and then the big ones. Thousands of stores were closed. Malls became zombie malls when their anchor store vanished. This drama has been going on for 10 years. The smaller and smaller number of surviving stores are splitting up amongst each other the shrinking sales.

They were once the iconic way in which Americans shopped. Their slow demise started in 2001 when their sales began their relentless decline as people could buy anything online that a department store had – and they did, and ecommerce pulled the rug out from under them. I have documented some of that drama since 2016 in my series, Brick-and-Mortar Meltdown.

But the surviving department store chains have substantial ecommerce sales, and they’re not included here; they’re included in ecommerce sales. The chart shows their brick-and-mortar sales: