With brief, occasional, italicized and sometimes gratuitous commentary…
• From CNBC:
"Walmart wants to tap what it sees as its greatest asset: its reach.
"Every week, 150 million customers visit its stores, website and app. The company not only wants to sell groceries, clothes and other items. It wants to chase new business opportunities, from bulking up its ad sales to becoming a major health-care provider. With the strategy, Walmart is acknowledging a tough reality: Retail may not be enough to power its future … Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said the discounter will weave together diverse services that customers want, from issuing a credit or debit card to dropping off groceries on their doorstep. It will also increase investments to cater to customers’ changed shopping habits, such as automation that will help it keep up with the heavy volume of curbside pickup orders."
“We feel emboldened and are now moving with even more speed and aggressiveness,” McMillon said. “We’re scaling new capabilities and businesses and designing them to work together in a mutually reinforcing way.”
This continues the narrative that I talked about in a commentary last Friday - that Walmart seems intent on broadening out its traditional business model that will allow it to continue to grow. And crush smaller, less-well-funded competitors.
An "emboldened" Walmart? Not good news for a lot of other retailers.
