Walmart, every mention
495 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Walmart
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 244Ben Gilbert 221David Senra 5Michael Mauboussin 3Jim Weber 2Dara Khosrowshahi 2Charlie Munger 2Steve Ballmer 1Michael Lewis 1Daniel Ek 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Walmart comes up
The NFL: How small-town teams became America's most valuable sports empire (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:01:07 Ben Gilbert So you already have this new, very high watermark and you already found the family behind Walmart.
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:52:04 Michael Lewis So unlike Walmart, it has billions of things on the shelf.
- ▶ 1:52:06 David Rosenthal Walmart has a hundred to 200,000.
- ▶ 1:52:12 David Rosenthal Walmart is a hundred to 200,000.
- ▶ 1:52:42 David Rosenthal If you're a Walmart buyer, you're dealing with hundreds of vendors.
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 8:23 David Rosenthal No, their market cap is about thirty billion dollars, so like a small fraction of Walmart and Costco and Amazon, etc.
- ▶ 50:54 Ben Gilbert It's this realization that, look, I don't think I'm gonna eventually be Walmart if I'm not gonna be Walmart or Kroger or Albertsons or, you know, one of the big giant quote-unquote winners.
- ▶ 1:01:51 David Rosenthal The average supermarket is like 50,000 square feet, and the average Walmart is like a 150,000 square feet.
- ▶ 1:38:33 David Rosenthal There's a reason that, uh, Walmart and Kroger's and-
- ▶ 1:45:45 Ben Gilbert Which is the opposite of most of these generic, like, you go to Walmart, the Great Value brand is a crappier version of the exact same branded product, but it's priceless, so...
- ▶ 1:46:30 Ben Gilbert Also, it's kind of interesting that Walmart has great value, Target has Good & Gather, Amazon has Basics, Costco has Kirkland Signature, Trader Joe's has Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 2:16:14 David Rosenthal The average Walmart has, like, a 150,000.
- ▶ 2:48:56 Ben Gilbert For a second comp, Walmart, which isn't all grocery, but a lot of it is grocery, has similar net income margins, similar growth, maybe it grows a little slower than Costco.
- ▶ 2:49:06 Ben Gilbert Walmart trades at 1.3 X revenue.
- ▶ 2:51:04 David Rosenthal Walmart works internationally.
- ▶ 2:55:56 Ben Gilbert It works with their brand promise in a way that Walmart Mini would totally fail.
- ▶ 2:56:00 Ben Gilbert A Walmart with less stuff?
- ▶ 2:56:04 Ben Gilbert The whole premise of Walmart is all the stuff.
- ▶ 3:00:25 David Rosenthal Costco, Amazon, Walmart.
- ▶ 3:26:58 David Rosenthal Walmart, of course, for sure.
- ▶ 3:27:00 Ben Gilbert Walmart.
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 1:40:19 Ben Gilbert He started Next.js, which is one of the world's most popular open source frameworks used by folks like Walmart, The Verge, Nike, Hulu, Anthropics, Claude, the list goes on.
- ▶ 2:15:18 Steve Ballmer You know, it's like Walmart's an okay company, even though it's, you know, net margins, whatever, percent and a half, two percent, you just got to make it up in volume.
Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:24 Ben Gilbert And their corporate strategy over the years is just as clever as companies like LVMH, Walmart, and Costco.
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 16:06 David Rosenthal I don't recall exactly like the Walmart story, but I mean, even that, I think Sam was like from family and banks and other folks taking money.
- ▶ 36:32 Ben Gilbert Harken back to our Walmart episode.
- ▶ 2:34:12 Ben Gilbert And that company is Walmart.
- ▶ 2:34:15 Ben Gilbert Walmart is valued at about 1.1 X sales.
- ▶ 2:43:17 Ben Gilbert Not so different than Walmart.
- ▶ 2:44:48 Ben Gilbert Walmart is about 600.
- ▶ 2:47:53 Ben Gilbert I mean, I get, Walmart sells furniture, but.
- ▶ 3:21:15 Ben Gilbert Anyway, if you like this episode, go check out our episodes on Costco, on Walmart, or on Amazon.
Renaissance Technologies (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:00:24 David Rosenthal Like Citadel can say the exact same things, just the same as like Walmart and Amazon can say, we too have large-scale supplier relationships that we leverage to provide low prices to customers, just like Costco.
Novo Nordisk (Ozempic) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:36:54 David Rosenthal In the year 2000, they signed a huge deal with Walmart.
Visa (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:40:36 David Rosenthal And famously, Walmart and Target, too, I think, have been trying to do this for years and years and years, and they never can make it work.
- ▶ 3:17:36 Ben Gilbert That's where the 30 cents kills you, but anytime that you are a low margin business, which many retailers are, if you're a discounter, if you're a Walmart, you're paying two, three percent of the whole transaction, but when you look at the…
Charlie Munger (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 28:15 Ben Gilbert Why do you think Walmart hasn't been successful once they saw Costco in competing?
- ▶ 28:22 Charlie Munger They were too wedded by the ideas they already had.
- ▶ 28:56 Charlie Munger And Walmart just let them do it year after year.
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:21 Ben Gilbert Their revenue per square foot of their warehouses belongs more in a conversation with Tiffany than Walmart.
- ▶ 5:59 David Rosenthal To someone that we talked a lot about on our Walmart episode, the legendary Saul Price and his two companies, FedMart and Price Club.
- ▶ 11:55 Ben Gilbert This is literally just like San Diego Walmart.
- ▶ 11:57 David Rosenthal Literally, that's what's about to happen here, just like 10 years before Sam and Walmart.
- ▶ 20:54 David Rosenthal So, why do you think Walmart is called Walmart?
- ▶ 21:07 David Rosenthal By the time Walmart was starting, people knew what Fedmarts were.
- ▶ 21:26 David Rosenthal Discounters are Walmart's, Kmart's, Targets.
- ▶ 21:42 Ben Gilbert It is much more like a Walmart.
- ▶ 29:23 David Rosenthal You might be listening and saying, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds good, but I'm thinking about, you know, I don't know, maybe I go to Walmart today, or I walk into Target, and I see some similar things written on the walls there.
- ▶ 31:14 David Rosenthal So in 2006, Harvard Business Review published a really great piece called The High Cost of Low Wages, where they very directly compare Costco and Walmart employee salaries and benefits.
- ▶ 31:28 Ben Gilbert Which, for listeners, if you want those numbers today, Costco's average hourly wage is 26 dollars, and Walmart's is nineteen-fifty.
- ▶ 34:41 David Rosenthal Kmart, if you remember back to our Walmart episode, came out of the Kresge department store chain, which was huge.
- ▶ 34:46 David Rosenthal So they had so much more access to capital, certainly than FedMart, and even than Sam Walton and Walmart.
- ▶ 35:39 Ben Gilbert One common thread from all the retail companies that we've talked about, Walmart, Amazon, and now Costco, is their obsession with making decisions based on data, even decades ago.
- ▶ 36:53 David Rosenthal Part of the Walmart empire.
- ▶ 39:08 David Rosenthal This is what almost every Walmart is today, the super centers.
- ▶ 39:29 David Rosenthal And it wasn't until the late eighties that Walmart would really embrace it and roll it out across America.
- ▶ 39:57 David Rosenthal Take this hypermarket concept and morph the existing FedMart stores into hypermarkets, which Walmart would do to great success, but like, 15 years later.
- ▶ 43:11 David Rosenthal They're gonna get steamrolled by Walmart and Kmart and Target and everybody else.
- ▶ 49:14 David Rosenthal So at the time, Walmarts and Kmarts had on the order of about 50,000 SKUs and even FedMart had
- ▶ 57:38 Ben Gilbert And just for comparison, Walmart turns their inventory eight times per year.
- ▶ 59:35 Ben Gilbert If you look at a Walmart today, they have something like a 100,000 to a 150,000 different SKUs that they sell.
- ▶ 1:07:50 David Rosenthal Walmart and Kmart and Target start, 1982 when all this is happening.
- ▶ 1:13:28 David Rosenthal Capital in order to be able to grow stores and compete with Walmart and Kmart.
- ▶ 1:13:44 David Rosenthal So, Price Club was certainly doing fine, it wasn't declining, but Jim and Jeff at Costco, and certainly Sam at Walmart and Sam's Club, they are pedal to the metal, aggressively expanding, and that's not really Saul and Robert's MO.
- ▶ 1:14:55 Ben Gilbert And at the end of the day, Price Club was either gonna land with Walmart or with Costco, and Sol Price didn't want it to be Walmart, and very, very much wanted to join forces with Jim Senegal.
- ▶ 1:16:36 David Rosenthal Sam's Club and Walmart was aggressively expanding at this point in time.
- ▶ 1:17:24 David Rosenthal Well, you know, it's a second business line under Walmart, of which the main Walmart Supercenter business line is one of, if not the greatest retail business of all time.
- ▶ 1:17:24 David Rosenthal Well, you know, it's a second business line under Walmart, of which the main Walmart Supercenter business line is one of, if not the greatest retail business of all time.
- ▶ 1:20:28 Ben Gilbert Walmart, by comparison, has a median income of about 80,000 dollars.
- ▶ 1:23:23 Ben Gilbert I mean, even at Walmart, a discounter, quote unquote, marks up 25%, which is almost twice as much as Costco's margin.
- ▶ 1:24:09 David Rosenthal Otherwise, they would just go shop at Amazon or Walmart or wherever.
- ▶ 1:25:02 David Rosenthal Costco's relationship with their suppliers is worlds apart from Walmart's relationship with their suppliers.
- ▶ 1:26:37 Ben Gilbert I imagine a Walmart buyer also tries to ask why.
- ▶ 1:30:10 Ben Gilbert So, Walmart's revenue today is about three times Costco in the US.
- ▶ 1:30:26 Ben Gilbert The average revenue per product, because of the SKU count, at Costco is about 10 times Walmart.
- ▶ 1:36:47 David Rosenthal Walmart has their house brand, you know, blah, blah, blah.
- ▶ 1:42:21 Ben Gilbert So Walmart and other retailers operated under the assumption that shoppers require selection.
- ▶ 1:47:36 Ben Gilbert Only 10% of Walmart has cross-stocked merchandise on a pallet system like this.
- ▶ 1:47:41 David Rosenthal And it's not like Walmart hasn't invested many tens of billions in their distribution and logistics systems.
- ▶ 2:02:22 Ben Gilbert And you're the third biggest player in the largest market, you know, America, behind Amazon and Walmart.
- ▶ 2:03:44 David Rosenthal If I remember from our Walmart episode, Walmart, I think, has over two million employees.
- ▶ 2:03:52 Ben Gilbert Yeah, so Costco's doing somewhere between a third and a half the total revenue of Walmart, but they're doing it with, what, almost an order of magnitude fewer people.
- ▶ 2:04:11 Ben Gilbert Walmart's about 600 dollars.
- ▶ 2:11:52 David Rosenthal Even bigger than Walmart, because they have so many fewer SKUs in the store.
- ▶ 2:12:23 David Rosenthal Costco could definitely make a higher margin than they do now and still charge lower prices than Walmart, but they choose not to, and instead they share that benefit back with customers.
- ▶ 2:14:58 Ben Gilbert I mean, Walmart is trying and still is not succeeding at it.
- ▶ 2:15:30 David Rosenthal Better place, I think, than Walmart.
- ▶ 2:21:46 Ben Gilbert And Walmart does six hundred and twenty billion.
- ▶ 2:21:50 David Rosenthal Costco obviously trades at a much higher multiple than Walmart.
- ▶ 2:22:44 David Rosenthal Whereas Walmart is kind of getting squeezed on both directions, I think.
- ▶ 2:22:53 David Rosenthal And then in boom times, I think people migrate out of Walmart into shopping on Amazon, shopping at Costco.
- ▶ 2:37:54 Ben Gilbert Target and Walmart's is something like 20%.
- ▶ 2:38:32 Ben Gilbert I mean, even Walmart's figured it out.
- ▶ 2:38:33 Ben Gilbert Walmart is as good for most use cases as Amazon, but they're paying the price.
- ▶ 2:41:55 David Rosenthal Maybe part of that is because Walmart has just been placing their resources elsewhere, particularly in the e-commerce fight against Amazon.
- ▶ 2:42:02 David Rosenthal Like, I think Walmart has basically decided, look, we're not gonna kill the Sam's Club business, but this is not where we're focusing our competitive energies right now.
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:53:53 Ben Gilbert Starter was going to kind of be there like Walmart brand.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi · Acquired
- ▶ 58:24 Dara Khosrowshahi So for example, Walmart,
- ▶ 58:26 Dara Khosrowshahi Isn't in our marketplace because they're Walmart, they have an incredible brand, et cetera, but they use our fulfillment services and more and more that our vision is we essentially want the local grocer to out Amazon, Amazon, like every…
- ▶ 1:33:53 Ben Gilbert Because the largest companies who, like even if you just look at employees, Walmart.
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