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I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

Today we conclude our series, Amazon vs Walmart, the Battle of the Titans. As the novel coronavirus hit, these retail giants are seeing a rise in profits, unlike many brick and mortar stores.

Walmart's US store sales increased almost 20% in March, compared to sales last year at that time, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Amazon's Google searches have nearly hit holiday season levels, recode recently reported, but there have also been struggles to keep up with the flood of customer demands during the pandemic.

Hundreds of thousands of workers have been hired collectively between Amazon and Walmart, and as we heard in our series, employees for both companies have accused management of not protecting workers enough from the threat of COVID-19.

So how are Amazon and Walmart handling the pushback from disgruntled employees, and will they become ever bigger threats in the retail market once the pandemic ends?

To get some answers, we're turning to Jason Del Ray. He's a senior correspondent covering commerce at recode. He also hosted a podcast from Vox and recode called Land of the Giants, The Rise of Amazon.

Del Ray has been covering the story, and he's here to tell us more about how Amazon and Walmart are faring against each other right now and what the future holds for both companies. And we'll get started.

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Jason Del Ray, welcome to Business Wars.

Thank you for having me.

Let's begin by talking about Amazon, which has been the focus of a lot of your work. As the COVID-19 crisis hit, it became a kind of lifeline for a lot of people, not just in the US but around the world.

What do you see as some of the companies' challenges in trying to respond to customer demands since the start of this pandemic?

They had several big challenges. One was just trying to keep up with the amount of orders coming in. Unlike the holiday season and unlike even prime day, they didn't have much time to prepare for this, both in terms of staff on hand and just inventory and stock.

I've always thought of Amazon as being sort of a data heavy company. I mean, you would think that seeing orders for certain goods or supplies in one part of the world might work.

Might raise some antennas around the offices of Amazon. That didn't happen, it seems.

I think it happened a bit, but like our government, like many populations, I think they just weren't totally prepared for the sort of how extreme the spike in demand would be.

I did also question whether they could have been a little more prepared for someone as data-centric as they are.

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