People Quotes
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Other tasks and other jobs changed, which enabled us to create new jobs that paid more and have fewer of the older jobs that went away. I hope what happens as we lead through this is that there will be pluses and minuses, but the net ends up being even more people because we have more ideas of how to grow.
Until we're serving humanoid robots and they have the ability to spend money, we're serving people. We're going to put people in front of people.
We're happy to serve people however they wanna be served. Customers these days shop in kind of an all-of-the-above way. They use stores, they use pick up, they use delivery.
We continue to invest in wages. So I think that's helping some, and that process will continue. As it relates to AI and the future of employment, I think for the most part, our folks are enthusiastic about it because they've seen new tools that they're receiving that are making their jobs better. That's helping them take fewer steps.
Our sales are growing so much. I think people are optimistic about the future of what their life can look like.
As I look across our company, we have everything from store associates to supply chain associates. Of the 2.1 million people (globally), something less than 75,000 of them are home office jobs. All the other ones are working in a store, a club, a distribution center. And I think those jobs change more gradually. We are still going to want to serve customers and members with people. The change as it relates to the home office jobs probably happens faster.
One of the biggest areas of change in the last decade is related to associates that work in our stores, picking orders for delivery and pickup for our customers. And we have something north of 200,000 people doing that job, and yet we have about the same (total) number of people working in Walmart U.S.
I think most Americans probably don't know what a tech makes that helps take care of our stores and clubs and that we can help them learn how to be a tech. The same thing's true for our drivers. So we have a need to get the word out so that people know there are some great jobs.
Today, we still have more than 300,000 U.S. associates who were with us since 2015 and are now leading teams, running stores and clubs, and continuing to grow their careers. Their stories are a reminder that when people are given opportunity, they make the most of it - and a culture of opportunity creates a cycle where happy associates lead to happy customers and members, and vice versa.
Ten years ago, we committed to investing in our associates through higher wages, new training opportunities, and changes to our scheduling and education programs. It was a step grounded in the belief that putting people first is always the right thing to do. These investments sparked momentum in our stores that we still see and feel today.
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.
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