Amazon's 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on FBA fulfillment fees took effect April 17. [1] [2] Walmart has not followed. Target has not followed. USPS had already moved — an 8% fuel surcharge on packages effective April 16, the day before Amazon's. [1] That is the whole of the retailer response to the war premium in the domestic supply chain.

The pattern is the signal. The paper's April 17 brief on Amazon activating the war surcharge named the mechanism; what five days of data add is the distributional answer. Amazon's surcharge announcement on April 2 — issued to third-party sellers in a note that cited "elevated costs in fuel and logistics" — is the only retailer response of its scale. [1] Yahoo Finance reported the 17-cents-per-unit average charge. Retail Dive flagged the "temporary" label sellers are already questioning. [1] [3]

The divergence is where MSM has not looked. Seller X — the Amazon FBA community that reads every fee change as a margin event — has spent the past five days comparing the non-follower pattern to the 2022-23 tariff cycle. [3] In 2023 Walmart and Target absorbed costs; Amazon passed them. The product-level decision pattern is holding again. Walmart's scale in groceries, Target's in household goods, and Amazon's in third-party marketplace each produce different cost-absorption incentives, and the five-day silence from the two physical chains is evidence that the structural difference is operative.

Day 5. Amazon's Thursday earnings call will have to name the surcharge by its first full reporting quarter. Walmart reports May 15. Target the next day.

-- DARA OSEI, London