Walmart, every mention
41 scenes · ← back to Walmart
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Benedict Evans 73Toni Cowan-Brown 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Walmart comes up
What jobs are AI jobs?
- ▶ 7:08 Benedict Evans Um, there are some cases where internet is not more efficient, like groceries, which is why Walmart is still a giant business, because it's actually more efficient to drive to the supermarket
AI and SaaS
- ▶ 13:52 Benedict Evans And one of the, the framings that I was sort of thinking about here for, for, for a big company is, um, you know, imagine you're the manager of Walmart somewhere in Jersey and there's a big, you know, once in a 30 year storm coming through. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:53 Benedict Evans At a certain point, if you're, if you're being, I mean, if you're being paid half a million dollars and running a Walmart with, you know, that hundred employees, then it kind of is your job.
Looking for AI strategies
- ▶ 0:37 Benedict Evans And it seemed to me that one of the things I struggle with is that what I'm most interested in and best at kind of talking about, or I find most congenial to talk about, is to sort of think about different products and think, well, you can…
Ai eats the world
- ▶ 8:57 Benedict Evans And so of course, like Walmart has a generative AI, it has a chatbot.
Tiktok, Apple and Temu
- ▶ 28:32 Benedict Evans Do you, um, give margin to Walmart and Walgreens to put your product in the stores?
Bundling/Unbundling AI
- ▶ 24:46 Benedict Evans You can't sell image recognition to Caterpillar or Walmart.
The magic customer
- ▶ 15:56 Benedict Evans So you've got this sort of cliff and on both sides of those, and now you don't need to be in every Walmart or every Sephora in the country, and you don't need to do, um, the, the nationwide TV spot or, you know, the back page of Elle or…
Amazon's $40B advertising business
- ▶ 8:32 Toni Cowan-Brown Next time you see Feastables in Walmart and soon to be new retails, could you clean up the presentation and make it look better?
- ▶ 9:18 Benedict Evans So Walmart did, I think, 2.7 billion dollars of advertising last year. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:10 Benedict Evans And obviously those all kind of blow into one in a sense, but like, there's only so many people who can do nationwide distribution to every Walgreens or Walmart or Macy's, and there's only so many people who can buy the back page of Vogue…
- ▶ 24:11 Benedict Evans Like Walmart doesn't run auctions for space in the shelves. 2 times in the scene
Generative AI
- ▶ 14:34 Benedict Evans 20 years of Walmart's accounts and make me a PNL.
All the other things happening in tech part 1.
- ▶ 23:35 Benedict Evans So you run across from Walmart to, A, like Walmart and Walgreens and Target and people like that. 4 times in the scene
TV after software
- ▶ 17:51 Benedict Evans You know, it's still, you're still Walmart, or you're still Best Buy, or you're still McDonald's, or whatever it is.
- ▶ 27:23 Benedict Evans Um, just as you know, nobody at GM in the sixties designing cars is really thinking about Walmart. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:01 Benedict Evans But they were not thinking about, you know, the way that cars hollowed out American small town life because everyone went to shop at Walmart.
Lighting and tech diffusion
- ▶ 23:17 Benedict Evans You know, the people running the app could kill Disney plus, but that's kind of like saying, um, you know, the people could doing the construction on the next branch of Walmart's could screw it up. 2 times in the scene
What's next for advertising?
- ▶ 16:09 Benedict Evans But secondly, this phrase merchant media, which means Amazon shows you ads in the search results, or Walgreens does, or Walmart, um, or Tesco, um, in which obviously they have a bunch of data about what you've been buying, and so they can…
Stories in the noise
- ▶ 2:33 Benedict Evans And then there was just a little headline that I saw that, um, from Walmart's results, latest results, Walmart's ad business, um, was two billion dollars. 6 times in the scene
Are you a seal?
- ▶ 16:45 Benedict Evans I would say it's kind of like saying is Walmart a car company? 4 times in the scene
Ukraine
- ▶ 7:59 Benedict Evans They were caught through a 500 dollar Walmart gift card that they hadn't realized was linked to an old email address of one of theirs.
The retail reset
- ▶ 5:33 Benedict Evans Um, and one extreme of that, of course, is obviously Amazon, which is basically the new Walmart, but, but there's also a whole bunch of other stuff around
- ▶ 13:05 Benedict Evans It's a different way of telling a story about a product, a different way of taking it to market, and of course, you don't need the national TV buy, and you don't need the inventory to get into Walmart, and all of that.
- ▶ 22:45 Benedict Evans However, it does make sense to have a hundred different sake brands, or a hundred different DTC brands selling this in different ways, because you don't have to be in Walmart, you don't need 3000 stores. 2 times in the scene
Asking the dumb questions
- ▶ 15:41 Benedict Evans And in the same way that like the second 50 years of the car industry wasn't about cars, it was about Walmart and McDonald's and suburbia and freeways.
- ▶ 26:22 Benedict Evans Is that tech or is that like saying that, you know, at a certain point, I mean, it's kind of the parody, you know, your website, your tech company or your restaurant with a website, you know, at a certain point, you know, is Walmart a car… 9 times in the scene
What we know about web 3 so far
- ▶ 35:47 Benedict Evans I mean, the, the, you know, another way I talk about this in every kind of different thing that I think about is that Walmart was not created by people from the car industry. 4 times in the scene
'Digital transformation' - beyond the silly slogan
- ▶ 41:42 Benedict Evans Or it means that now Zara is possible, or it means that now Netflix is possible, um, because you can actually do a different thing or run a company in a different way.
Bezos and the Amazon machine
- ▶ 11:37 Benedict Evans And if you're worried about Amazon, you're worried because it competes with Macy's and Target and Walmart and like actual physical retailers. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:49 Benedict Evans Which goes to my point about, no, Walmart did not swallow all of retail. 3 times in the scene
Telling stories with charts
- ▶ 27:44 Benedict Evans And like, you know, Amazon has better operational leverage than Walmart.
Two Europeans talk about China
- ▶ 14:21 Benedict Evans You couldn't just do Walmart.
The history of doom-scrolling
- ▶ 34:46 Toni Cowan-Brown But you have to be in a privileged position to support your small businesses because it costs a lot more than it does to hop over to Walmart and get what you need there or Target or wherever.
What comes next?
- ▶ 12:26 Benedict Evans They sell trucks full of stuff to Walmart.
- ▶ 15:54 Benedict Evans So it's McDonald's and Walmart and freeways and suburbs, and all the good and bad things that happened as a result of mass car ownership.
- ▶ 25:35 Benedict Evans Um, and it won't be that, you know, five guys in a flat in, you know, five people in an apartment in San Francisco are going to disrupt them, but it will be that, you know, that the nature of the product changes, which again is sort of… 2 times in the scene
How do you destroy a tech monopoly?
- ▶ 17:19 Benedict Evans And so if you're saying Amazon's market is e-commerce, then you're saying it doesn't compete with Macy's and Walmart.
Amazon and eCommerce
- ▶ 5:46 Benedict Evans Um, that's sort of a very, very big contrast, not actually to Walmart or Walgreens or a bunch of other kinds of retailers, which all of which sit with Amazon as what I would call retail as logistics.
- ▶ 18:40 Benedict Evans It lets you shop the way you shop at Walmart.
- ▶ 36:21 Benedict Evans And it won't just be Amazon any more than groceries was just Tesco and Walmart or any more than physical retail was just Macy's or just John Lewis.