Business Quotes

There were several people that realized the customer is telling us something and the idea of a broad assortment delivered to your home is appealing.

Everybody loves convenience, everyone wants to save time. But we had built a business called the Supercenter business that was one stop shopping that helped people save time and you had instant gratification because you could walk in the Supercenter and you could get 120,000 SKUs, and they were the best items from around the world.

Always thinking about the customer value proposition is including price, assortment, experience, and trust, and all of those have been changed by technology and been changed by e-commerce, and so leading up to the moment when I took this role, there was an understanding that we needed to invest in e-commerce, grow e-commerce, but we didn't take it seriously enough.

If you think that a store e-commerce business is the answer, you end up thinking that a population of less than a million items is enough, and you end up thinking that you don't need an e-commerce marketplace, and you end up thinking other things.

The stores are an asset, and they have a great assortment in them and they're close to people. Being within 10 miles of 90% of America is a huge advantage, especially with fresh food at a good price. But we must also, if you think long-term and you think about what the company wants to accomplish, you must have a big and important first-party e-commerce business, and you must have a marketplace, and the things that go along with the marketplace.

I've drank all the Kool-Aid and am completely convinced that Walmart should be here for the next generation of retail, because we're so wired to fulfill our purpose of helping people save money and live better.

By the time we got to 2020, we had leaders that had a stronger digital acumen, e-commerce set of capabilities and beliefs.

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.

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.

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.