Ranking America’s Largest Retailers on Workforce and Customer Technology
Retail rankings traditionally answer one question: Who sells the most?
The TIG Retail Technology 100 asks a second question:
Which of America’s largest retailers are making the best use of technology for their employees and their customers?
The 2026 National Retail Federation Top 100 Retailers provides the starting point. Compiled by Kantar, the NRF ranking measures retailers principally by 2025 U.S. retail sales. Walmart remains No. 1, followed by Amazon, Costco, Kroger and Home Depot.
The Industry Group (TIG) and RetailSystems.org add another layer: an independent assessment of how effectively these companies deploy technology across their retail operations.
Each retailer receives two grades:
Workforce Technology Grade — technology that helps employees, stores, fulfillment operations and management work more effectively.
Customer Technology Grade — technology customers encounter directly or that materially improves the shopping and service experience.
The objective is not to reward technology for technology’s sake. A retailer does not earn an A simply because it deploys more screens, kiosks, robots or AI.
The question is whether technology is deployed at meaningful scale, integrated into operations and actually improves retail.
2026 TIG Retail Technology 100
| Rank | Retailer | 2025 U.S. Sales | Workforce | Customer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walmart | $575.99B | A+ | A+ |
| 2 | Amazon.com | $293.85B | A+ | A+ |
| 3 | Costco Wholesale | $198.73B | B+ | B |
| 4 | The Kroger Co. | $154.74B | A | A |
| 5 | The Home Depot | $141.12B | A | A |
| 6 | CVS Health | $139.37B | A- | A- |
| 7 | Walgreens Boots Alliance | $112.05B | B+ | B+ |
| 8 | Target | $102.72B | A | A |
| 9 | Lowe’s Companies | $83.96B | A | A- |
| 10 | Albertsons Companies | $81.77B | A- | A- |
| 11 | Apple Stores / iTunes | $75.90B | A | A+ |
| 12 | Publix Super Markets | $62.75B | B+ | B+ |
| 13 | Royal Ahold Delhaize USA | $59.83B | A- | A- |
| 14 | Aldi | $58.36B | B+ | B+ |
| 15 | TJX Companies | $46.30B | B | B |
| 16 | H.E. Butt Grocery / H-E-B | $44.16B | A | A |
| 17 | Dollar General | $43.13B | B+ | B |
| 18 | Best Buy | $38.23B | A- | A |
| 19 | Ace Hardware | $27.55B | B+ | B+ |
| 20 | 7-Eleven | $25.30B | A- | A- |
| 21 | Meijer | $22.82B | A- | A- |
| 22 | Ross Stores | $22.70B | B | B- |
| 23 | AT&T Wireless | $22.10B | A- | A |
| 24 | Verizon Wireless | $21.78B | A- | A |
| 25 | Macy’s | $21.68B | B+ | A- |
| 26 | BJ’s Wholesale Club | $21.05B | A- | A- |
| 27 | Dick’s Sporting Goods | $20.20B | A- | A |
| 28 | Wakefern / ShopRite | $19.57B | B+ | A- |
| 29 | Dollar Tree | $18.93B | B | B |
| 30 | O’Reilly Auto Parts | $17.07B | A- | B+ |
| 31 | AutoZone | $15.94B | A- | B+ |
| 32 | Tractor Supply Co. | $15.52B | A- | A- |
| 33 | Nordstrom | $14.90B | B+ | A- |
| 34 | Kohl’s | $14.78B | B+ | B+ |
| 35 | Hy-Vee | $14.19B | A- | A |
| 36 | Menards | $14.10B | B | B |
| 37 | Gap | $13.43B | A- | A- |
| 38 | Wegmans Food Markets | $13.36B | B+ | A- |
| 39 | Sherwin-Williams | $12.60B | B+ | B+ |
| 40 | Chewy.com | $12.60B | A | A |
| 41 | Ulta Beauty | $12.39B | A- | A |
| 42 | Health Mart Systems | $12.25B | B | B |
| 43 | Family Dollar | $11.91B | B- | B- |
| 44 | Alimentation Couche-Tard / Circle K | $11.58B | A- | A- |
| 45 | Burlington | $11.48B | B | B |
| 46 | Wayfair | $10.97B | A | A |
| 47 | WinCo Foods | $10.65B | B | B+ |
| 48 | Giant Eagle | $10.63B | B+ | A- |
| 49 | Discount Tire | $10.41B | B+ | B+ |
| 50 | Good Neighbor Pharmacy | $9.74B | B | B |
| 51 | Saks Global | $8.97B | B | B+ |
| 52 | Sephora (LVMH) | $8.89B | A- | A |
| 53 | Sprouts Farmers Market | $8.81B | A- | A- |
| 54 | Harbor Freight Tools | $8.20B | B+ | B+ |
| 55 | Northeast Grocery | $7.96B | B | B+ |
| 56 | PetSmart | $7.81B | B+ | B+ |
| 57 | Chedraui | $7.73B | B+ | B+ |
| 58 | Bass Pro | $7.56B | B+ | B+ |
| 59 | Williams-Sonoma | $7.55B | A- | A |
| 60 | Army and Air Force Exchange Service | $7.48B | B+ | B+ |
| 61 | Amway | $7.35B | B+ | B+ |
| 62 | Hobby Lobby Stores | $7.26B | C+ | C+ |
| 63 | QVC Group | $7.07B | B+ | A- |
| 64 | AVB BrandSource | $7.02B | B | B |
| 65 | Bath & Body Works | $6.69B | B+ | A- |
| 66 | Dell Technologies | $6.58B | A | A- |
| 67 | True Value Co. | $6.47B | B | B |
| 68 | Total Wine & More | $6.39B | B+ | A- |
| 69 | Camping World | $6.37B | B+ | B+ |
| 70 | JD Sports | $6.37B | B+ | A- |
| 71 | Lululemon | $6.33B | A- | A |
| 72 | Casey’s General Store | $6.32B | A- | A- |
| 73 | Dillard’s | $6.27B | B- | B |
| 74 | Signet Jewelers | $6.20B | B+ | A- |
| 75 | Staples | $6.10B | B+ | B+ |
| 76 | Academy Sports | $6.02B | B+ | B+ |
| 77 | J.C. Penney | $5.96B | B | B |
| 78 | Piggly Wiggly | $5.85B | B- | B |
| 79 | Petco | $5.77B | B+ | A- |
| 80 | Raley’s Supermarkets | $5.63B | B+ | B+ |
| 81 | Market Basket / Demoulas | $5.54B | C+ | C+ |
| 82 | Victoria’s Secret | $5.43B | B+ | A- |
| 83 | IKEA North America | $5.30B | A- | A- |
| 84 | Michaels Stores | $5.29B | B+ | B+ |
| 85 | Defense Commissary Agency | $4.83B | B+ | B+ |
| 86 | Stater Bros. | $4.81B | B | B+ |
| 87 | Exxon Mobil | $4.79B | A- | A- |
| 88 | Overstock.com | $4.76B | A- | A- |
| 89 | Five Below | $4.76B | B+ | B+ |
| 90 | American Eagle | $4.70B | A- | A- |
| 91 | Grocery Outlet | $4.69B | B | B |
| 92 | Weis Markets | $4.69B | B | B+ |
| 93 | Urban Outfitters | $4.63B | B+ | A- |
| 94 | Ingles Markets | $4.50B | B- | B |
| 95 | Tapestry | $4.44B | A- | A- |
| 96 | Murphy USA | $4.34B | A- | A- |
| 97 | Advance Auto | $4.30B | B+ | B+ |
| 98 | Schnucks | $4.10B | A- | A- |
| 99 | Abercrombie & Fitch | $4.09B | A- | A |
| 100 | Save-A-Lot | $4.06B | B- | B |
Sales rank and 2025 U.S. retail sales: NRF 2026 Top 100 Retailers, compiled by Kantar. Technology grades: preliminary independent editorial assessments by The Industry Group (TIG). Grades will be updated as additional deployment evidence becomes available.
What We Mean by Retail Technology
Technology maturity is difficult to measure because the most visible technology is not necessarily the most important technology.
A kiosk or robot attracts attention. Inventory accuracy, associate workflow, fulfillment optimization or an integrated loyalty platform may create substantially more value.
For that reason, TIG separates technology into two broad areas.
Workforce Technology
The Workforce Technology grade considers areas including:
- Associate mobile devices and applications
- Workforce and task-management systems
- Inventory visibility and RFID
- Analytics and decision support
- AI-powered employee tools
- Computer vision
- Warehouse and fulfillment automation
- Robotics
- Pricing and merchandising systems
- Integration and deployment at scale
The key question is simple: Does technology make the retailer’s employees and operations measurably more effective?
Customer-Serving Technology
The Customer Technology grade considers:
- Self-checkout and self-service
- Ordering and service kiosks
- Mobile applications
- Digital commerce and omnichannel integration
- Loyalty and personalization
- Digital payments
- Electronic shelf labels and digital signage
- Pickup, lockers, curbside and fulfillment
- Customer-facing AI
- Accessibility and inclusive design
Again, deployment matters more than experimentation.
A retailer conducting an interesting AI or robotics pilot does not necessarily outrank a company that has successfully deployed relatively conventional technology across thousands of locations.
The Grocery Sector Helps Explain the Methodology
Grocery provides a particularly useful example because the sector increasingly divides its technology investments between customers and operations.
Our recent review of 2026 grocery technology trends found a nearly even split between customer-facing technology and back-end operational technology.
Digital loyalty programs, electronic shelf labels, digital signage, self-checkout and touchscreen ordering remain important customer technologies.
Behind the scenes, grocers are investing in analytics, training and retention systems, inventory tools, AI and employee enablement.
That distinction matters.
The future of retail technology is not simply about replacing employees with machines.
In many of the strongest deployments, technology makes employees more effective while simultaneously reducing friction for customers.
Walmart and Amazon Set the Technology Benchmark
It is difficult to put anyone other than Walmart and Amazon at the top of a broad retail technology assessment.
Amazon has fundamentally changed fulfillment, logistics, personalization, digital commerce and retail automation. Its technology infrastructure is inseparable from its retail model.
Walmart presents a different case.
Its challenge is integrating digital technology with one of the largest physical retail infrastructures in the world.
Associate devices, inventory systems, fulfillment automation, e-commerce, pickup, self-checkout, payments, applications, data and AI must operate across thousands of stores and enormous transaction volumes.
That combination of technology breadth and deployment scale earns both companies preliminary A+ grades.
Costco Is the Interesting Counterexample
Costco may be one of the most revealing companies in the entire ranking.
It is America’s third-largest retailer in the NRF ranking but does not attempt to present itself as a technology laboratory.
That doesn’t make Costco technologically unsophisticated. It means its operating model emphasizes simplicity, volume, membership and disciplined execution.
Our preliminary B+ Workforce / B Customer assessment illustrates an important principle of this index:
Technology grade is not the same thing as business grade.
A retailer can operate an extraordinarily successful business without maximizing the amount of technology visible to customers.
Conversely, deploying enormous quantities of technology does not guarantee a good retail operation.
Regional Grocers May Punch Above Their Weight
Some of the most interesting companies are farther down the sales ranking.
H-E-B, Hy-Vee, Wegmans, Meijer, Giant Eagle, Schnucks and other regional operators deserve close examination.
Grocery is becoming a particularly rich environment for integrated retail technology because stores combine conventional checkout with pharmacies, prepared food, pickup, delivery, loyalty, digital promotions, electronic pricing, foodservice and increasingly sophisticated fulfillment operations.
That creates opportunities for technology that don’t exist in simpler retail formats.
Our initial grades therefore show several regional grocers outperforming their revenue rank technologically.
Customer Technology Is More Than Self-Checkout
Self-checkout is probably the most visible customer-facing retail technology, but counting self-checkout lanes would be a poor way to measure technology maturity.
A modern retail customer journey can involve:
Parking → mobile application → store entry → product discovery → digital pricing → loyalty → service → checkout → payment → pickup → customer support.
Increasingly, the experience begins before the customer enters the building and continues after the transaction.
Curbside pickup, lockers, outdoor digital infrastructure, EV charging, digital wayfinding and mobile check-in therefore belong in the broader retail technology conversation.
Accessibility Counts
TIG also considers accessibility part of customer technology maturity.
A self-service system that works well for most customers but excludes customers with disabilities is not a fully successful technology deployment.
That applies to self-checkout, kiosks, mobile applications, payment devices, pickup systems, digital signage, EV charging and other customer-facing systems.
Accessibility therefore should not be treated as a separate compliance exercise conducted after technology has been selected.
It is part of system design.
AI Doesn’t Automatically Earn an A
Artificial intelligence will inevitably become a larger component of this ranking.
But merely announcing an AI initiative doesn’t materially affect a TIG technology grade.
We are more interested in deployed use cases.
On the workforce side those may include:
inventory management, out-of-stock detection, merchandising, forecasting, associate assistance, fraud detection, workflow automation and decision support.
On the customer side they may include:
search, personalization, conversational assistance, product recommendations, customer service and increasingly voice-based interaction.
The distinction between AI announcement and AI operating infrastructure will become increasingly important.
Technology Has to Work
There is one additional factor that conventional technology rankings frequently miss: reliability.
A dead digital sign isn’t digital transformation.
Neither is an unavailable kiosk, malfunctioning self-checkout, broken pickup workflow or mobile application that forces the customer to find an employee.
Retail has accumulated a remarkably fragmented technology infrastructure.
POS, kiosks, digital signage, payment systems, electronic shelf labels, lockers, EV chargers, mobile applications, networks, sensors and AI systems increasingly coexist at the same physical location.
The next stage of retail technology maturity therefore isn’t simply deploying more endpoints.
It is monitoring, managing and maintaining the infrastructure already deployed.
That is why remote monitoring, device management, observability, security and operational support should increasingly factor into assessments of retail technology maturity.
About the Grades
The 2026 TIG Retail Technology 100 should be viewed as a living research project rather than an immutable ranking.
The sales ranking has an objective external source.
The technology grades are editorial assessments.
TIG will refine those grades as additional information becomes available from retailers, technology providers, public deployments, case studies, store visits and industry research.
Retailers and technology providers are encouraged to provide documented deployment information.
The most useful evidence includes:
- Number of deployed locations
- Number of deployed devices
- Technology function
- Deployment dates
- Employee or customer use case
- Integration with other retail systems
- Accessibility capabilities
- Measured operational results
Pilots and demonstrations are useful intelligence, but scaled production deployments carry considerably more weight.
Bottom Line
The NRF Top 100 tells us who America’s largest retailers are.
The TIG Retail Technology 100 is intended to answer a different question:
Who is actually using technology well?
The answer will continue to change.
AI is moving into operations. Electronic shelf labels are expanding. Self-service continues to evolve. Associate technology is becoming more capable. Physical and digital retail are merging. Accessibility requirements are becoming harder to ignore. And the infrastructure connecting all of these systems is becoming increasingly important.
That makes retail technology maturity less about owning individual pieces of technology and more about whether the entire system works together—for the retailer, for its workforce and ultimately for the customer.
Sources and methodology: Retail sales and rank are based on the National Retail Federation 2026 Top 100 Retailers, compiled by Kantar using principally 2025 U.S. retail sales. TIG technology grades are independent editorial assessments by The Industry Group and RetailSystems.org and are not NRF or Kantar ratings.
© 2026 The Industry Group (TIG) / RetailSystems.org
