In 2015, when Amazon opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore, there was a lot of speculation about what the company was really up to. Were the stores designed to sign up new Prime subscribers? Were they hubs for the company’s expanding same-day delivery operation? Could they be stations for the company’s budding drone fleet? Or perhaps these stores were just what they appeared to be: Amazon’s first step to replace the bookstores it had driven out of business.

By the end of 2017, Amazon will have seven bookstores, making it the fifth-largest chain bookstore in the country—itself an alarming sign of what happens when the company infiltrates a supply chain. But with its $13.4 billion purchase of the high-end grocery chain Whole Foods, all of that speculation seems quaint. Shortly after it opened its first bookstore, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote, “Amazon is opening a bookstore for two big reasons: 1. It can. 2. It is driven by a relentless desire to conquer literally everything in its path, and brick-and-mortar retail is a thing.” The purchase of Whole Foods is a sign that CEO Jeff Bezos’s vision of the Everything Store is frighteningly literal: Amazon’s goal is a takeover of retail itself, both physical and digital.

The impact of the Whole Foods acquisition has already been dramatic. After the deal was announced, the value of Amazon’s stock went up by more than the purchase price, which means the deal paid for itself. The value of Amazon’s closest competitors, including Target, whose stock dropped by 10 percent, and Walmart, whose stock dropped by 5 percent, fell by an even larger amount.

Amazon’s goal is a takeover of retail itself, both physical and digital.

This is not what is supposed to happen. Amazon’s stock is supposed to drop with the acquisition of a troubled company. But Wall Street is only reacting to what is obvious: that Amazon is so powerful that anything standing in its way is toast. And while this is great for Amazon’s shareholders, most Americans can’t afford to be so blithe. When one of the nation’s biggest companies enters—and threatens to overwhelm—a whole sector of the economy, the consequences are enormous. If Amazon now controls the pricing in the book industry, just imagine what it can do in the broader world of retail.

“This is horrible for competition,” the director of the New America Foundation’s Open Markets program Barry Lynn told the New Republic. “This is the crushing of competition. Amazon is monopolizing commerce in the United States. It set out to become the company that when you said to yourself, ‘I’m going to go buy something online,’ you would say, ‘I’m going to go to Amazon.’ Now Amazon is seeking to become the company when you say to yourself, ‘I’m going to go buy something’ you think Amazon.”