Benedict Evans, from a terrific read entitled TV, retail, advertising and cascading collapses:

When Sears and Macy’s go bust, how many malls do they take with them, and how many other retailers that might have been doing fine on their own will go or lose a lot of their footprint because of that? And, where were those retailers advertising? What was their TV budget? How much of this is self-reinforcing – the more you buy online, the more you buy online?

And:

Suppose you go on eBay and buy the last ten years’ of Elle Decoration and drop it into Google Brain, and then wave your phone at your living room and ask what cushions or lamps you would like?

And:

Suppose I put a bunch of HD cameras in the right parts of Berlin and Brooklyn and track what people are wearing, entirely automatically, and then see what of that shows up in middle America in a year, and then apply that pattern matching to what people are wearing in Berlin now?

And:

There’s a famous Jeff Bezos quote that ‘your margin is my opportunity’ – right now Amazon is building a billion dollar ad business in its own search results, but I suspect he also looks at the $500bn that’s spent every year on advertising and the further $500bn that’s spent on marketing and sees money that should be going to lower prices and same-day or 1-hour delivery.

The mechanics of retail are changing. Margin (simplistically put, what Apple charges for an iPhone minus what they pay to create that iPhone) is critical to a company, necessary for them to prosper, grow. The slimmer the margin, the thinner the ice on which that company skates.

In “your margin is my opportunity”, Bezos sees disruption in large margins. He does not need to advertise products. The company that creates the product pays for the advertising/marketing out of their margins. An opportunity indeed.