The Walmart blueprint: CEO John Furner’s first interview in the top job

Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to see you again.

Yeah, good to see you again. Well, first, I have been around the company most of my life. I kind of joke that I started when I was three years old when my dad started at Walmart and officially...

Well, I wasn't getting paid. I wasn't doing anything. But I certainly love hearing about all the stories from dad, which really is what I want to talk about today. This week is our associate celebration week. We have thousands of associates here from all over the world to celebrate what they do each and every day. In the last six months or so, even before I was officially in the role, I've had a chance to go to a lot of our markets in Asia, here in the US, Mexico, Canada, and I wouldn't say it's a surprise, but what's been refreshing is just seeing how many of our people are getting up every day. They go in to work on a team, take care of each other, build things, innovate. And what my conclusion is after this first, call it, four months is there's just more in common in all these markets than I think what I remember. And I say that, remember, because I've lived out of the US a couple times. I've traveled obviously in different roles I've had. But seeing it through this lens and seeing how our associates have a common purpose, they have common values and the way they're innovating, working together, it's really impressive. It's really fun. And so this week is a bit of a full-circle moment from the 48 years, call it, that I've been around a part of the company and the 33 years working at the company. This is going to be a really exciting week to get everybody back together.

It's our people, you know, by far. There's so much innovation happening. The spirit of trying to get up and to change things is there. We have people that are experimenting. We have people that are doing every kind of job you can imagine. I've really liked getting to know people who had started at Walmart. They didn't know what they were going to do. Now they're a store manager. They may be a truck driver or a maintenance tech or they might be a technician in one of our supply chain warehouses that has gone through massive transformation. It's the people, the stories, and these are real people out doing great work. And I started here working in the garden center and did a number of jobs in the store. I managed a couple stores. I managed a market. I spent time at sourcing. So, you know, it's just getting to give back in some way that's personal to all of those people that have had such amazing careers here, made such a difference. Getting to be a part of it has been really exciting.

We're really excited about strategy. For the last five or six years in the US in particular, I could talk about other markets as well. We've been working on what we'd call an omni strategy, which is we want to be there for a customer with what they want, how they want it, when they want it, whether that's delivered at their home, in their refrigerator, at the curbside, at the shelf. We want to be really flexible. And we've seen a lot of success over a number of quarters where we've had consistent results and part of the results that have been consistent, that were again consistent in the first quarter, was top-line growth and then share gains. And we've had share gains across multiple income groups now for a few years running straight. And then this last quarter we had share gains across all the different categories that we're in, which was great to see. The share gains have been strongest for the last few quarters for the upper-income customers that we've been attracting to the brand over the last few years and that remained true in this quarter. And we, but we also wanted to acknowledge that rising fuel prices are real. They certainly have an impact on a customer's ability to spend. If they're buying more at the gas station, then that may be less dollars they can do with other things. And the stat that we talked about on the call was we were seeing now customers and members at Sam's Club when they fill up, they're buying a little less than 10 gallons per trip. And that's a little lower number than we've seen in a while. It's probably been about four years since we've seen that. So we just acknowledge that, you know, customers are making choices. We've said for probably two and a half, three years that the customer has been very resilient and choiceful. That remains true and then depending on what your personal situation is, there are situations where customers are having to make some decisions and trade-offs.

Nothing from what we talked about on the call. The fuel statistic is an important one just to be aware of what people are doing. And you know what that means also is they're taking more trips. Most of the customers that we're talking about haven't necessarily, from what we can tell, they're not buying less fuel. They're just doing it in more frequent intervals and they're coming more often. There are other things that we of course will watch for as time progresses, but you know, we're hopeful that over the next couple months and there has been, looks to be some relief in the crude oil market. So hopefully the next couple months we'll see some of those prices come down, particularly as you get into back-to-school season and you have a number of families around the country and around the world for that matter that are thinking about how they best equip their kids for the first day of class, whether it's the right backpack, the right apparel, the lunches they want to pack. So, you know, hopefully we see some relief before we get into the fall.

Yeah, it's generally correct. I mean there were three areas that we changed going into this fiscal year so late January, early February. There were three areas that we wanted to make sure that we were doing what we would call build once and scale globally. And that's true in product and design. That's Daniel Danker's role which also includes acceleration AI. Suresh is our global chief technology officer and he's been in that role and that remains true. And then the third was we had a chief growth officer in Walmart US at the layer that we gave responsibility for the areas that he was leading and managing for the entire enterprise. And so the three of those, if you take a step back and look at what they're doing, we're positioning ourselves so that we have platforms that once we build something somewhere in the world and it's an idea that we like that works and we believe can scale, we can scale it across the platforms. There have been times in our past where we built things, I would say, in pockets or we built things that were novel that really do the same thing, which really goes back to that first comment I made. And what I find in our business units and I've seen this now in five countries is a lot of the same work is happening. They're just nuanced locally and they may be built slightly differently. And the idea that we can build something once, scale it globally, pick up our speed and then get the features out to our associates and customers across markets. That's really what we're trying to do. So with each of the three of those roles, they're focused on the fastest way that they can accelerate the work they're doing on platforms to every country and every associate that we're working with.

Sounds about right.

So the majority of the capital expenditures are happening in two parts of the supply chain. That's our stores and our actual supply chain that is working upstream for the stores and the fulfillment center. That's what you're describing is the forecast. It's about the right number. That's a multi-year forecast that we've been running under. And it's a combination of remodels where, you know, we're remodeling probably 650 to 660 stores this year, which is exciting. They're performing well. They look better. They get a better apparel set. They get a new home set. They get improvements in pet, beauty, and categories that our customers are telling us that they're looking to Walmart for solutions in. The second, which is the supply chain. This is a multi-year journey. We've been investing in the supply chain and the transformation of it now for several years and I would say we're probably halfway through, maybe a bit more. We have around 60% of our stores this year that are receiving deliveries from some sort of automated solution. And for the store, that's a really big step change in terms of the quality that they receive. So imagine that the job I did when I started the company, I'm working in the garden center and every day my job was to make sure that the shelves are full. I'd go find the out-of-stocks. I would make sure that the counts are right. Having a system where when inventory comes off the truck, it goes not only to the department, but right to the aisle that it belongs into. It's just so much faster and easier for our associates to get through the things that they need to so that they can get on to the things that they want to do, which is what I see all over the country and all over the world is just taking care of customers and talking to people. So, big phase in supply chain. Really happy with the progress we're making. And then there are a few other things that as you get into that allocation which you mentioned, some of it's technology obviously as we build out agentic capabilities and other capabilities all designed to try to help our associates have the best access to technology and tools to make their day a bit faster and easier. You know what we're trying to do for our associates is give, we each of them, I'll just talk about Walmart US for a second. They have handheld devices that we issued. They have an AI agent that's running in the background of it. And we're trying to help our associates get to proficiency much faster than what it would have taken someone like me over 30 years ago is you have to learn so many parts of the role by having them have the technology in their hands to empower them to be the very best they can be. We just think it's a much better experience for them from the time they started until, you know, they'd be running circles around what I was doing probably 90 days in because the tools and the technology are so much better. So, it's a blend of all those things. But really, really, really excited about the work in the supply chain and store remodels.