Ignore Facebook. There were just two stories in the consumer sector this quarter – Amazon and everyone else.

The retail giant blew through revenue forecasts, extending its existing dominance with the help of its Alexa voice control system. So tight is the company’s lock on consumers that it now brags about attracting online advertising.

The market rewarded Amazon with a 35 per cent uptick in value. This week the company overtook Alphabet to become the second-biggest capitalisation stock in the world. Using our cumulative market cap visualisation tool, Amazon resembles nothing less than a tent pole holding up the S&P500.

Then there’s everyone else. Leaving aside Netflix, which is a mini-Amazon in its own right, most retail stocks have performed dismally this year – both in the US and UK. This echoes the stories of high-street bankruptcies such as Toys ’R’ Us and Radio Shack, and swathes of stores being closed by the likes of JC Penney and Marks & Spencer.

For some time it’s been something of a sport to blame Amazon for the woes of retail. There are even ‘Death By Amazon’ indices to track the performance of the most vulnerable. Risky Finance has prepared a visualisation tool to help investigate. For the US, we took 112 retail stocks from the Russell 3000 index starting at the end of 2015. For the UK, we used 42 retail stocks from the FTSE all-share index.

The controls at the bottom allow you to select the index, the time period and whether to exclude Amazon from the US retail sample. For the 2015-2017 period, including Amazon in a capitalisation-weighted retail portfolio increases the returns from 40% to 70%. For 2018, Amazon adds 10% of returns to the portfolio.

Or contrast the market cap added by Amazon this year – $180 billion or $2 million per minute – with the total market cap of $22 billion lost by its retail competitors. Remember, these samples include successful online companies like Netflix or Ocado.

In defence of Amazon, one might argue that it has never been better to be a consumer, while many high-street stores that closed were tired and uninspiring. This pro-consumer argument remains Amazon’s best defence against antitrust action.

Yet one must ask how long that argument can survive. There are questions about the meaning of public space in a high street retail desert and what that means for a society where everyone conducts transactions staring at a screen. There are questions about the tax system that penalises bricks and mortar, while rewarding offshore clicks.

And finally, in the week that Facebook finally experienced a reckoning of sorts for its role in undermining democracy, we should ask how healthy it is for Amazon to harvest so much user data, especially as it now seeks advertising dollars.

Amazon may be priced for world domination, but it must look like a long way down from the top of that tent pole.