People Quotes

There are all these things that add up into this business that's Walmart that keeps it really interesting. At the root of it all, though, it's a people business and it's a merchandising business. Today, it's increasingly a technology business. The supply chain is critical, of course, and real estate still plays a key role.

Today, Walmart employs about 2.1 million associates. The vast majority of our management team started as an hourly, just like I did. If you walked around here, not just here in Arkansas, but around our company, you would find a lot of people with more than 20 years of service, and you'd find a lot of people who've joined the company to climb up the ladder and create opportunities for themselves.

Volunteer for something extra, volunteer for something hard. One of the reasons that I got the opportunities that I got was that I would raise my hand when my boss was out of town and he or she was visiting stores or something, and someone needed to pinch hit and go to a meeting, I would go, and if I knew the answer to the question that came up, I'd share it, if I didn't, I'd say, "I don't know, but I'll find out fast and get back to you." I then put myself in an environment where I became a low risk promotion because people had already seen me do the job.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I think that people that shop Walmart frequently and love the brand the most find it very natural to come to us first for e-commerce. But for others that may shop around or not have chosen to shop at Walmart in the past, you get what you earn, and our opportunity to earn their business starts with winning their grocery and consumables basket.

India is an important part of Walmart's story and over the past two decades, we've strengthened and expanded our partnerships in the country to empower people and help local businesses grow

The sales floor probably gets more people. And what we're seeing in supply chain is that it's basically the same number of people with just a whole lot more productivity, but their jobs change.

I think what we've seen happen so far is that as we've applied technology for the picking process in the store, for example, is that job composition has changed but we have about the same number of people.

I bet you that over time, because we come up with new ideas to grow sales, we end up with about the same number of people making more money.

The kind of outcome we want is where associates are getting paid more and are supervising robotics instead of walking miles and lifting heavy items.

We believe in servant leadership. We're looking for altruistic people that can put other people first.

My best days have been when we've been able to raise wages for associates. I love doing that and I want to keep doing that. It's also important to have low prices.

We're an 'And' company, we're people and tech, we're stores and e-commerce, we're innovation and execution.