Quotes By Doug McMillon

E-commerce had become so big and the plan was moving along such that you can't undo it now, you can make it better, you can plus it up, you can find some synergies and remove some of the older problems we had of the separation, but it created some newer problems and some complexity on how you actually integrate a supply chain, for example.

People were wondering, "How do you even do food e-commerce? Are we going to be dropping strawberries on somebody's doorstep? It doesn't feel like we're going to be doing that". But what we believed is that in the US pickup might work. So we started in California and then Denver, and a team started working to put everything in place to do grocery pickup and in the beginning we even had a separate app. It was an orange online grocery app.

It was always the plan to bring things together, but just like the structure, it needed to be separate for a while for good reasons. We couldn't pick at store level the full Supercenter for a while. It's a lot harder to receive an e-commerce order and pick a toy at Christmas on time than it is to pick the strawberries every day, because you know where they are.

We love basket businesses, the Supercenter is a basket business, Sam's Club is a big basket business. We want to build an e-commerce business that's a basket business, not just a spear fishing exercise.

One way to think about Walmart is a very large river of merchandise, moving from raw material to a customer and anytime that river of merchandise has imperfections, we either have an out of stock or we have some sort of overstock that creates additional costs, labor markdowns, accidents, damages.

We grew this business with the store operators and the merchants making all the decisions, I got to be one of the merchants and it was a lot of fun. But to put the customer in charge, you have to start with design.

We've actually set the tech priorities driven off what we want to build for customers and what they're asking us to solve, and that's how it's going to be, and that is a cultural tension even today because we actually want some of both, we want ownership.

One of the technology leaders, a few years ago, was visiting with me here and we were writing on the whiteboard and they stopped and turned around and looked at me and said, "Oh my God, you're going to win." And I said, "Yeah, but why?". "Now, tell me how".

So, what I think, sometimes a pure tech company can underestimate is the importance of culture, the importance of a purpose.

So I care what people think, and I like people, and I like employing people and I like creating opportunity for people so I'm pro-people and I want the technology to help us serve people. Of course, we want machines to do what machines are best at, you must and you want to, and at the same time, we should consider the importance of being purpose-driven.

People need a "Why?". I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek, people need to know why they're doing what they're doing, me included, and they want to work at a company with values and a culture that matches those values and I think that those things matter even in a pure tech company.

I think scale matters, and being an Aggregator creates lots of opportunity, but scale also has a lot of disadvantages and it's an imperfect concept.

I experienced, along with the rest of the team, what it was like to go from being a Cinderella story with a great entrepreneur in Sam Walton to being large and disliked just because you're large, and all of the negatives that went with it. So I personally don't use the word "scale" very much because when I hear that word I think of pain.

We needed masks. Finally, the US settles the debate on whether we're going to wear masks or not, and John Furner tells me on a Zoom, "I'm glad they decided that we need them because I bought more than a hundred million recently and they're on the way".

The unique proposition that we have is that we can link a digital ad back to a physical store purchase down the road.

It can improve the customer experience if ads are done in the right way and we also want to make sure that we don't do anything that causes our prices to go up in our retail business.

That holy grail of being able to more perfectly estimate demand and match supply to it, is within the field of view of that acquisition too.

I think you can love more than one child, and we've got to do all these at once. I think there's a store inventory opportunity for us and buying and selling merchandise is hard, by the way. There's a lot of people here that have been doing it for a long time and they're good at it, thankfully, but it's not easy.

There are times when we want to own that inventory because we want a great customer experience, or we can take advantage of the amount of quantity we'll buy.

The marketplace is so important because we got to be in the consideration set. When somebody takes their phone out, and it's so easy to choose where you're going to go shop, if you don't have a really broad assortment, you're not even in the consideration set, and so that's one of the reasons why I was so convicted that we needed a marketplace all along, and others were too.