Amazon annual revenue

Amazon's annual revenue and the US dog treat market have grown together with the kind of statistical harmony that suggests either that dogs are doing a lot of online shopping, or that the same economic forces that made Jeff Bezos unfathomably wealthy also made Milk-Bones more expensive. The correlation is 0.988 across eighteen years, which is close enough to perfect that you could mistake it for causation if you squinted, which is exactly what you should not do. The dogs are not placing orders. Probably.

Both markets are beneficiaries of the same consumer spending boom that defined the 2005–2022 era. Amazon grew from 8 billion to 575 billion in revenue by capturing an ever-larger share of retail spending, while the dog treat market grew from about 3 billion to over 11 billion as pet humanization turned treats from an afterthought into a premium category—freeze-dried liver, dental chews with probiotics, birthday cakes shaped like bones. A significant portion of those premium treats are, in fact, purchased on Amazon, making this correlation slightly less spurious than most: the platform that grew to dominate retail also became the dominant channel for the pet products that grew alongside it. Both curves are measuring the same thing: Americans spending more money, on more things, delivered faster.

When two growth curves track this closely for nearly two decades, the temptation is to assume one drives the other. The reality is simpler and less interesting: everything grew. Amazon grew, dog treats grew, and the economy that fed them both grew. The only loser in this equation is the person who thought they could walk into a pet store without spending forty dollars.