Every day low problems. Walmart CEO Doug macmillan is trying to convince shoppers that his stores are fashionable, and convince talent that Bentonville is the new Austin, and convinced Trump that the global retail colossus is as American as it gets. The selling seems to be working so far. By Ji One Kung and Devin Leonard read aloud by Mark Leedorf. It's been part of the job for every chief executive officer of Walmart for the past half century to work with U S presidents, and for Doug mac millan, Donald Trump's first tour in the White House was no different. The two got to know each other during the COVID nineteen pandemic, when Walmart secured masks and gloves for the public and turned its store parking lots into testing sites. But that didn't stop the CEO of the world's biggest retailer, whose political credo might best be described as thou shalt do nothing to alienate the customer from speaking out on measures he disagreed with. McMillan condemned Trump's response to a violent twenty seventeen protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying he missed a critical opportunity to help bring the country together by unequivocally rejecting the appalling actions of white supremacists. He registered his disappointment again when Trump was accused of instigating the deadly riots of January sixth, twenty twenty one, lamenting that Americans had been divided by what he described as the fiction of a fraudulent election. But when Trump won a second term on November fifth, McMillan adopted a more conciliatory tone. That same month, to the dismay of some investors and employees, Walmart announced it had shed some of its diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Walmart says this change had been in the works prior to the election. Then McMillan joined the cavalcade of business leaders who made the pilgrimage to mar A Lago. He says his message to Trump was simple, how can we be helpful? McMillan said this at his office at Walmart soon to be headquarters in Bendonville, Arkansas, in January. At the time, Trump's inauguration was only three days away. McMillan wasn't sure he'd be attending. I was invited he said, without much enthusiasm. With it moving inside, the seats got cut in half, so I don't know if I'm still invited. The following Monday, he was there, though not in the VIP section, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Walmart's longtime nemesis Jeff Bezos. With a resurgent Trump back in the Oval office, it would have scarcely benefited the chief executive officer of the world's largest retailer to have been a no show. Trump hasn't exactly been bad for Walmart, as a quick perusal of its website suggests. There you'll find an array of Trump items, including make America Great Again, Trucker hats, Trump King of USA, socks, Trump twenty twenty eight, I'll Be Back, beach towels, Daddy's Home t shirts, and books such as The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump. Most of these items are found at Walmart's rapidly growing third party online marketplace that Walmart now has this kind of e commerce engine full of Trumpy and Baubles, along with fancy sneakers, refurbished electronics, pre owned Chanel, Fendi and Prada handbags, and a fair amount of Biden Harris Memorabilia is a testament to how dramatically McMillan has been able to transform the company after becoming its CEO in twenty fourteen. A four decade Walmart veteran who started out unloading trucks, he's taken a business once considered to be an Internet clueless dinosaur and sold it to Wall Street as an e commerce power with not only an online marketplace, but also a rapidly growing advertising business, Walmart Connect, and a primelike subscription offering Walmart Plus, whose free same day delivery is possible because ninety percent of Americans reside within ten miles of one of its stores. McMillan is now also pitching the rect tailor synonymous with rock bottom prices, as one that can cater to wealthier shoppers too, even in an inflation weary age. Since twenty twenty one, Walmart has remodeled two thousand of its more than forty six hundred US stores, many of which have long been unabashedly downscale, into cheerier places with wider isles, better lighting, and improved signage. Last April, it rolled out a fancier private label food line with branding that could have been hatched in a Brooklyn lab, Italian carne pizza baked in a lava stone wood fired oven, authentic French macaron from an almost century old family bakery, and no shortage of plant based fare. Customers can also find midi shirt dresses and denim utility jackets conceived with the help of Brandon Maxwell. The designer who's dressed everyone from Michelle Obama to Carly Class in frocks that typically sell for more than one thousand dollars, now oversees Walmart's more fashion forward in house clothing brand. If some of this seems lifted from the target playbook, that should come as no surprise. Two executives toiling on the store redesign previously worked at Walmart's Minneapolis based rival, But McMillan's most audacious sales job might be his campaign to lure talent to Bentonville. For decades, its top executives ran the company out of an old warehouse, emphasizing that such no frills digs demonstrated their commitment to keeping costs low. In January, however, McMillan presided over the opening of a three hundred and fifty acre Walmart campus that looks like an offshoot of the Google Plex. The new spread is still unfinished, and as of January, many of the senior executives, including McMillan, had yet to move in. But once it's completed, Walmart's new home will include twelve renewably powered office buildings with windows scrubbed by drones, a fitness center complete with meditation rooms and pickleball courts, and a bougie suburb's worth of walkable shops and restaurants featuring a brewery, a bike store, a tapas bar, a sushi place, and a coffee shop serving up items like salted honey, oat milk flat whites. Such a monumental project with a multi billion dollar price tag might seem wildly incongruous in Bentonville. Two decades ago, it was ensconced in a dry county and had a downtown that looked very much as if it had been hollowed out by a Walmart superstore or two. Now it has an Austin in the Ozarks vibe. Just watch out for the e bikers whizzing around town, many of whom look suspiciously like coastal transplants. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is the degree to which McMillan's salesmanship has paid off, particularly at a company whose very size has made it susceptible to stagnation. Almost a decade ago, Walmart trailed not only Amazon but also eBay and Apple in online sales. Under McMillan, it's become the world's second largest e commerce company, with online sales this year expected to reach one hundred and fifteen billion dollars according to eMarketer. That's not even a quarter of Amazon's expected five hundred and thirty one billion dollars, but Walmart is catching up. Higher income shoppers also seem to be giving it another look. The company says seventy five percent of last fall's market share gain came from those with an annual income of more than one hundred thousand dollars. More store employees are staying at the company a result of its recent investments in higher wages and better benefits, with some of its most successful store managers earning more than six hundred thousand dollars each year. Its wooed executives from Google and Amazon, and last year, Walmart's shares rose by an astonishing seventy two percent, outpacing those of Costco, Kroger and Target. One wonders what Walmart's founder, Sam Walton, a notorious penny pincher who once warned that every time Walmart spends a dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customer's pockets, would have made of all this. But it's McMillan's Walmart. Now. I give him my Nobel prize, says Ram Sharan, the famed business consultant speaker. He's quiet, he doesn't talk too much, and he's been able to build Walmart into a new high growth engine. McMillan may have staved off its extinction, but perhaps no American retailer has more on the line. With Trump back in the White House, the president's promise of mass deportations raises the specter of raids at large employers, and his onslaught of tariffs will almost certainly make it harder for Walmart to honor its low price promise. With an isolationist mandate in Washington, it's probably best for McMillan to portray Walmart as the quintessential American company, always its preferred pitch, even if it's the quintessential globalized business. With more than ten thousand, six hundred stores worldwide and supply chains circling the world, including in China. He has to figure out how to be a CEO who doesn't put himself in the crosshairs of controversy with anyone his employees, his customers, or the president. Our attitude is we're here long term, he says. We're a large employer, we serve a lot of people. We want the country to thrive. Until now, every Walmart CEO has inherited Sam Walton's former office in the companies soon to be vacated Legacy Headquarters. With its wood paneled walls, dim lighting, and first floor view of the parking lot, the room looks more suitable for the head of a regional trucking company than the steward of a global retail colossus. Yet McMillan seems comfortable enough here, laid on a Friday afternoon, sitting back in a chair, legs crossed in a blue shirt, gray pants, and black shoes that look like they could have been purchased at one of his stores. The books on the shelves behind him seem to have been selected to convey a sense that he's not just a retail practitioner, but someone who's read and thought deeply about his trade. They include many about Walmart, some about rivals Amazon, Kmart and Target, and others about social issues, such as Isabel Wilkerson's best selling Caste The Origins of Our Discontents. The same shelves also hold conversation pieces, allowing McMillan to share folksy stories about how he's occasionally blundered but has always come a way wiser for it. He grabs a football dating to his time as head of Sam's Club, explaining how he pushed his executives to buy as many as possible, only to be chagrined when they arrived with black laces that customers didn't want. We marked them all down, McMillan says, so attention to detail is the lesson there. He talks about how he felt on his first day as CEO, when faced with the prospect of moving into the same office where Walmart's founder once held court. He says he was so spooped that he put it off for a day going out and visiting stores instead. It's pretty intimidating, McMillan says, I mean Sam was legendary. Walton founded the company in nineteen sixty two, and it eventually eclipsed Kmart and Sears to become the country's largest retailer. He could be pitiless as far as he was concerned. Putting mom and pop stores out of business meant they weren't doing a good enough job. Before his death in nineteen ninety two, he'd become a folk hero, one of the country's richest men. He still drove around his small town home in a dented Ford pickup and kept a shotgun in his office in case he needed to leave in a hurry to hunt quail. Never mind that in his final years he resided in a breathtakingly stylish modern home designed by a local disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was good to be sam by the Oughts. However, Walmart's shares had plateaued. Comparable store sales, a critical metric in retail, dipped checkout lines were unending. There was just this perception at the time that you'd never go to Walmart, or you'd go and you'd never find anything, or it would just be a service disaster, says Ron Thurston, author of the book Retail Pride. Walmart fought off unionization efforts in the US, but that didn't stop labor leaders and their allies from highlighting the company's then lower wages and dismal benefits. Its critics coined the term the Walmart effect to describe how they argued it was impoverishing small towns and forcing suppliers to move their operations overseas. Perhaps the lowest point for the company came in twenty twelve, when The New York Times reported that it had bribed officials in Mexico. Walmart ultimately paid nearly two hundred and eighty three million dollars in criminal and civil penalties to US federal authorities to resolve the charges. In twenty nineteen, and in what might best be described as a classic business school cautionary tale, Walmart whiffed spectacularly on the internet. It introduced Walmart dot Com in two thousand, but there always seemed to be members of the leadership team who feared that if they moved too quickly to sell stuff online, they'd cannibalize the stores. There was a pretty significant and influential pocket within the company even then that was not convinced Amazon was indeed a threat, says Vinki Harinarian, co founder of Cosmics, a search startup Walmart bought for three hundred million dollars in twenty eleven. When McMillan took over as CEO, his resume hardly suggested he'd be the company's savior. After graduating in nineteen eighty five from Bentonville High School, where he was voted most attractive, he went to work at a local Walmart warehouse. He says he remembers being impressed by a poster over the recruiting desk depicting a Walmart tractor trailer running a Kmart vehicle off the side of a mountain. I'm like, huh, this is a competitive spot, McMillan says, I like that. He got his MBA at the University of Tulsa in the early nineties and returned to Bentonville to become a Walmart buyer, where he soon witnessed how e commerce was beginning to upend retail. It was very clear to me that that was a really important part of the future, he says. There were debates internally as to how aggressive we should be, and I was all always on the aggressive side. He was promoted to CEO of Sam's Club in two thousand and five. Four years later, he became CEO of Walmart's international division and saw how quickly consumers in China were embracing shopping with their phones. By then, he was being talked about as a possible candidate to succeed company CEO Mike Duke. When it finally happened in twenty fourteen, McMillan says the first thing he did to get sales growing again was Ray's wages. At the time, many of Walmart's workers were making less than nine dollars an hour. In early twenty fifteen, McMillan announced a plan to increase starting hourly pay to ten dollars. That October, he stunned investors by telling them it would cost two point seven billion dollars. He tried to soften the blow with a twenty billion dollar share buy back plan. It didn't work. That day, Walmart lost twenty percent of its market value and McMillan was excoriated on CNBC by Mad Money host Jim Kramer. Maybe you need every penny to beat Amazon, Kramer lectured him, maybe the stock's not a good investment. The stock recovered, and McMillan set out to banish the notion within Walmart that Amazon could be ignored. I've been told I should ride around town in the afternoon and see how many of my executives have Amazon boxes on their front porch, he said to a group of them at an early meeting, according to someone there who didn't want to be identified because he wasn't authorized to speak about it publicly. In twenty sixteen, McMillan negotiated a three point three billion dollar deal for Walmart to acquire Jet dot Com, a money losing would be Amazon challenger, whose founder Mark Lore was a former Amazon executive whose eagerness to cross swords with the Seattle based company was widely known. McMillan entrusted Lore to run Walmart's entire e commerce operation and go on an acquisition spree, which led the company to buy online shopping start ups such as men's clothing site Bonobo's and outdoor retailer Moose Jaw. Mc millan found himself refereeing culture clashes between Law's team and their Walmart peers, for whom frugality and humility were essential virtues. The Jet people's idea of bonding was watching HBO's Silicon Valley during work hours. They blanched at joining their new colleagues in the Walmart cheer give me a W, give me an A, give me an L, give me a squiggly, at which point everybody joins in a collective booty shake. Lawer's enormous compensation package, dwarfing even McMillan's, also rankled Bentonville colleagues. Jet was supposed to become Walmart's e commerce brand, a vehicle to reach urban shoppers, but Walmart ended up shutting it down four years after the acquisition, later selling Bonobo's and Moosejaw instead. Lore encouraged the retailer to throw all its weight behind Walmart dot Com, which had struggled over the years because of the company's lack of commitment. Customers, it turned out, liked ordering groceries on the site and picking them up at the stores. During the pandemic, Walmart reconfigured store layouts to accommodate a flood of online orders, and that business exploded. Walmart's US e commerce sales increased seventy six percent in twenty twenty alone to fifty three billion dollars, according to e Marketer. The Jet deal brought an influx of much needed tech talent, which made it easier for the company to recruit others from Silicon Valley who might have previously turned up their noses at an offer from Bentonville. It probably didn't hurt that McMillan had established himself by then as a new kind of Walmart's CEO, smooth enough to win over Wall Street and dabble in politics. He discontinued the sale of merchandise with the Confederate flag on it, and called for state officials in Arkansas not to pass a bill limiting LGBT rights. He raised his company's already ambitious climate goals. Walmart, it seemed, was no longer the target of the kind of criticism leveled against it in the aughts. Another massive retailer, frequently accused of destroying neighborhood stores and treating its employees ungently, had taken its place. The Boogeyman, says Neil Saunders, Managing director of Global Data, is now Amazon. We'll be right back with everyday low problems. Welcome back to everyday low problems. Bethany Frankel is not the sort of person you'd expect to find praising Walmart, but in December she logged into TikTok and proceeded to do exactly that. In a video that received more than thirty two thousand likes, the former Real Housewives of New York City star revealed that the company had been selling a dupe of Irmez's hard to find and supremely coveted burkein bag. The starting price for a real burkin is around ten thousand dollars. Thanks to a third party selling on the Walmart marketplace, anyone could now buy a fake burkin a furkin for a mere eighty five dollars. As far as Frankel was concerned, Walmart was democratizing fashion. This is breaking some luxury glass ceiling, she said. In a subsequent review, Frankel revised her assessment. Holding up a bonafide burkin, she declared, this is like flying private of the furkin. This is like flying spirit in the luggage compartment. The viral furkin moment exposes the awkwardness that Walmart has sometimes had trouble navigating, trying to be both cool and mainstream, protecting supplier relationships while opening up to the anything goes chaos of a third party marketplace. The last time it attempted to cast itself as hip the gambit bombed. Metro seven was introduced in two thousand and five as what executives then described as a premium fashion brand which had twenty dollars velvet blazers and twenty four dollars pairs of distress genes and other items aimed at urban women. Walmart promoted the brand with ads in Vogue and a New York Fashion Week event in Times Square. It added organic foods years later, in what many considered an effort to become more like Target and lure more upscale shoppers, Walmart revamped stores, ditching thousands of products to make shelves less cluttered. Bargain hunters with fatter wallets who flocked to its stores during the two thousand and eight financial crisis came not in search of cheap, chic clothing, but looking for deals for toothpaste and toilet bowl cleanser. When the economy improved, those shoppers disappeared. Walmart reversed course on the ill fated store revamp, and Metro seven, not fashionable enough for upscale shoppers and too costly for Walmart's core customers, was axed. Now, the retailer is once again chasing upscale consumers, relying on similar methods. Along with another round of store reboots, Walmart put its muscle in the last several years behind two fashion forward affordable clothing lines designed under the tutelage of the company's new creative director Maxwell. During New York Fashion Week in September, celebrities like Project Runway judge Nina Garcia and female rapper Doshi emerged from SUV's in Manhattan's Meatpacking District to attend Maxwell's Spring wardrobe show, sponsored by Walmart. After models strutted about in very non everyday low priced dresses and pantsuits, guests were shuffled to an adjacent pop up store, where they sipped tequila and flipped through racks of garments. Maxwell helped imagine for Walmart's Free Assembly and scoop brands. Walmart hopes its new look will bring in more higher income shoppers. The company also acknowledges that the current uptick in those consumers has been prompted partly by inflation. The question is whether those shoppers will vanish again once the cost of a dozen eggs stabilizes. Inflation has been Walmart's friend, says Kirti Kajanam, executive director of the retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University in California. Walmart executives say the company will do a better job of cementing permanent relationships with these newer arrivals because it has something didn't the last time around. It's thriving digital business. Upscale shoppers who are more likely to be tethered to their phones and laptops and who might never want to step into a store will never have to. They can just get products speedily delivered. The retailer's third party marketplace allows it to tempt those hunting online for specific products twenty eight hundred and ninety nine dollars Gucci bags, for example, or four hundred and sixty eight dollars retro Nike Jordan's they'd likely never sell in one of their stores, and its thousands of influencers remind shoppers to keep coming back. Walmart says its online operation could finally turn a quarterly profit this year. The company is reluctant to provide much financial detail on its newer digital ventures, but UBS predicts that the company's in house advertising unit, which primarily relies on traffic on Walmart's website and mobile app, will generate about six billion dollars in sales globally this year. As for its marketplace, Emarket predicts that its US sales will top thirteen billion dollars this year, still a sliver of Amazon's anticipated three hundred and sixty billion dollars. Walmart's chief financial officer, John David Rainey says his company is moving in the right direction, but we need to be in order of magnitude bigger than what we are today. Of course, the more Walmart becomes like Amazon, the more likely it is to have Amazon like problems. When a reporter brings up the furkin, Walmart's executive vice president for Fashion, Denise in Candela, says, the buzz around the bag couldn't have been more welcome. It was a viral moment. She says, it's still a viral moment. We sold out pretty much overnight. Others at Walmart grimace when asked about it, after all, it was a fake. Tom Ward, former chief e Commerce officer at Walmart US and now head of online and Supply Chain at Sam's Club, says the reason the Ferkin is no longer available on the marketplace is that Walmart took it down if some but he describes an item as something it's just not. We're not going to let you sell it, Ward says. McMillan sounds as if he'd rather not talk about it. I'm not an expert on that subject, he says, noting he only recently heard about the fake bag. You have to talk to somebody else. When pressed, he acknowledges that opening up the retailer's digital shelves to anyone makes everything more complicated. Trying to build trust and being responsible for things in a world where you don't actually own all the inventory and make all the decisions, he says, is more challenging. Arkansas Republican governor and former Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took the stage at the unveiling of Walmart's new campus in mid January. Looking around, it's hard to believe that we're not in Silicon Valley or New York City, she said. Once it's completed, the campus will have one thousand bike parking spaces and five thousand freshly planted trees. Locally sourced mass timber, the latest and sustainable building materials, is being used in the construction of several of the buildings. A roof top bar in a Marriott AC Hotel will also open on campus, named after Sam Walton's old quail hunting spot in South Texas. I think it's safe to say that Arkansas has never had a development project like this ever before and probably ever again, Sanders said. Earlier in the day, mc millan gave a lengthy speech to employees about Walmart's move to the new campus. No reporters were allowed, but in a video Business Week obtained, mc millan shifts into blunt, motivational speaker mode. He stresses that the digital transformation that began on his watch is hardly over. We're still behind in some metrics, still behind in terms of volume, he says, but we've got momentum and we can make this work now. He doesn't specify, but it's fairly obvious what mc millan means. Amazon is expected to generate seven hundred billion dollars in revenue this year, closing in on Walmart's estimated seven hundred and nine billion dollars, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It's also been enormously expensive just to get this far, he says, pointing to a chart on the screen behind him showing how spending has driven down Walmart's operating margin. Most CEOs get fired when this happens, He says, I'd like to thank our board once again for not firing me. Bentonville's makeover from sleepy rural backwater began a decade plus ago with Sam Walton's descendants, who still control more than forty percent of Walmart's shares and as of December, had a combined fortune of four hundred and thirty two billion dollars. In twenty eleven, Sam's daughter Alice Walton, opened the more than one billion dollar Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, designed by modernist architect Mosha Safti, which features artists including Khindi Wilie, best known for his portrait of former President Barack Obama hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. The following year, members of the family back to a successful effort to overturn Benton County's dry staff. More recently, two third generation Walton's brothers, Tom and Stuart have turned Bentonville into a mountain biking mecca, creating networks of trails in the area so enviable that the US National Mountain Bike Team now calls the town home. Through their various real estate and hospitality companies. The brothers have also opened Blake Street, a private club where members can work out and then order drinks from an outdoor bar while taking a cold plunge or a dip in the pool. The Ledger, a co working space with an outdoor ramp that wraps around the building, enabling visitors to ride their bikes to their temporary spaces on all six floors rather than troubling themselves with the elevator. Lady Slipper, a cocktail bar where customers can sip the house beverage, a variation of a Negroni on tap and motto by Hilton, a boutique hotel with a popular sushi restaurant and tiki themed bar. The city's demographics are also shifting. Mayor Stephanie Orman boasts that it now has this state's first cricket field, which she says serves the influx of South Asian tech workers relocating to the area, some of whom presumably work at Walmart. We designed that around our large Indian population, she says. Still, not all Walmart employees are convinced they're going to stick around for this next chapter. In conjunction with the opening of Walmart's new campus. The company said it was closing offices in Dallas, Atlanta and other cities and requiring employees to move to Bentonville or Sunnyvale, California, to encourage in person collaboration while eliminating hundreds of positions as it consolidates corporate hubs. Several executives have already left rather than relocate, including Sam's Club's chief technology officer cheryld Ioah. On a corporate Zoom call in May, three hundred web designers, some of whom were asked to relocate, lobbed unhappy questions and concerns. As a member of the lgbt QI plus community, I don't feel safe in Arkansas, one wrote, women's rights are being rolled back there, some one else commented. One of their peers, who identifies as black and LGBT, said he'd move to Bentonville six months before, even though he and his partner had been very nervous. Their experience so far has been positive. There is community here, he wrote in the chat. On a Saturday afternoon, there's an anti abortion rally on the town square with protesters standing beside signs with slogans, one of which says the baby inside your body is not your body. They are met with an equal number of counter protesters carrying signs with slogans like abort the Patriarchy. Sitting at the bar at Motto's Sushi Spawn on a Tuesday night in January, a patron engages a Business Week reporter in a lively political conversation, volunteering that he has a safe full of guns at home. If people like himself had heeded Trump's call to descend on Washington on January sixth, twenty twenty one, he explains, there would have been a real insurrection. We might have lost, says the former Wall executive, but it would have been an insurrection. Now, of course, Trump's back and McMillan needs to figure out how to deal with his second term. Retailers like Walmart probably expect more whiplash. In one instance, during Trump's first term, the forty fifth president caused avocado prices to rise simply by threatening tariffs on Mexico. That was hardly immaterial to Walmart, which sells them along with guacamole in everything from squeeze bottles to freeze dried packages to thirty two ounce jugs. At the last minute, Trump pulled back now. His vow to slap Mexico with twenty five percent tariffs, delayed as of press time, could have Walmart customers reconsidering whether they can afford their favorite dip, especially when prices for Mexican avocados are already up fourteen percent from last year because of a drought. Tariffs on China could have similar effects. It's a prodigious supplier of clothing, furniture, appliances, and pharmaceutical ingredients. Even if tariffs are imposed, Walmart's immense buying power and its global supply chain, allowing it to source products from an array of different countries, puts it in a better position than Target or Kroger to squeeze suppliers and keep down prices. At least that's Walmart's hope. We've been dealing with tariffs for a long time. McMillan says, I think we will navigate that. There are plenty of other unknowns for him to manage his way through while trying to boost his company's sales and operating margins. Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the newly confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, wants to halt food stamps from being used to pay for soda and junk food. Walmart receives an estimated twenty six percent of all Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP spending, and shopper's grocery dollars could take a significant sales hit under such a scenario. Trump's proposed immigration restrictions, like doing away with temporary protected status for migrants from Haiti, Ukraine and other countries, could make it harder for the company to fill positions at its stores and distribution centers. Even with all that to figure out, the only time mc millan's voice starts to quiver is when he talks about leaving behind Walton's old office, which he's likely to do in May. That will be an emotional moment, he says. I try not to think about it too much, and I'll try to do it alone. I don't want anybody around. When he first moved in, he wanted to put up a white board, only to have people at the company tell him he couldn't do it because Sam didn't have one. Nope, mc millan told them Sam had a peg board. The whiteboard went up and there will be one on the wall of mc millan's new office on the third floor of a building that will surely have a better view. He probably can't wait to get there.

Every day low problems. Walmart CEO Doug macmillan is trying to convince shoppers that his stores are fashionable, and convince talent that Bentonville is the new Austin, and convinced Trump that the global retail colossus is as American as it gets. The selling seems to be working so far. By Ji One Kung and Devin Leonard read aloud by Mark Leedorf. It's been part of the job for every chief executive officer of Walmart for the past half century to work with U S presidents, and for Doug mac millan, Donald Trump's first tour in the White House was no different. The two got to know each other during the COVID nineteen pandemic, when Walmart secured masks and gloves for the public and turned its store parking lots into testing sites. But that didn't stop the CEO of the world's biggest retailer, whose political credo might best be described as thou shalt do nothing to alienate the customer from speaking out on measures he disagreed with. McMillan condemned Trump's response to a violent twenty seventeen protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying he missed a critical opportunity to help bring the country together by unequivocally rejecting the appalling actions of white supremacists. He registered his disappointment again when Trump was accused of instigating the deadly riots of January sixth, twenty twenty one, lamenting that Americans had been divided by what he described as the fiction of a fraudulent election. But when Trump won a second term on November fifth, McMillan adopted a more conciliatory tone. That same month, to the dismay of some investors and employees, Walmart announced it had shed some of its diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Walmart says this change had been in the works prior to the election. Then McMillan joined the cavalcade of business leaders who made the pilgrimage to mar A Lago. He says his message to Trump was simple, how can we be helpful? McMillan said this at his office at Walmart soon to be headquarters in Bendonville, Arkansas, in January. At the time, Trump's inauguration was only three days away. McMillan wasn't sure he'd be attending. I was invited he said, without much enthusiasm. With it moving inside, the seats got cut in half, so I don't know if I'm still invited. The following Monday, he was there, though not in the VIP section, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Walmart's longtime nemesis Jeff Bezos. With a resurgent Trump back in the Oval office, it would have scarcely benefited the chief executive officer of the world's largest retailer to have been a no show. Trump hasn't exactly been bad for Walmart, as a quick perusal of its website suggests. There you'll find an array of Trump items, including make America Great Again, Trucker hats, Trump King of USA, socks, Trump twenty twenty eight, I'll Be Back, beach towels, Daddy's Home t shirts, and books such as The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump. Most of these items are found at Walmart's rapidly growing third party online marketplace that Walmart now has this kind of e commerce engine full of Trumpy and Baubles, along with fancy sneakers, refurbished electronics, pre owned Chanel, Fendi and Prada handbags, and a fair amount of Biden Harris Memorabilia is a testament to how dramatically McMillan has been able to transform the company after becoming its CEO in twenty fourteen. A four decade Walmart veteran who started out unloading trucks, he's taken a business once considered to be an Internet clueless dinosaur and sold it to Wall Street as an e commerce power with not only an online marketplace, but also a rapidly growing advertising business, Walmart Connect, and a primelike subscription offering Walmart Plus, whose free same day delivery is possible because ninety percent of Americans reside within ten miles of one of its stores. McMillan is now also pitching the rect tailor synonymous with rock bottom prices, as one that can cater to wealthier shoppers too, even in an inflation weary age. Since twenty twenty one, Walmart has remodeled two thousand of its more than forty six hundred US stores, many of which have long been unabashedly downscale, into cheerier places with wider isles, better lighting, and improved signage. Last April, it rolled out a fancier private label food line with branding that could have been hatched in a Brooklyn lab, Italian carne pizza baked in a lava stone wood fired oven, authentic French macaron from an almost century old family bakery, and no shortage of plant based fare. Customers can also find midi shirt dresses and denim utility jackets conceived with the help of Brandon Maxwell. The designer who's dressed everyone from Michelle Obama to Carly Class in frocks that typically sell for more than one thousand dollars, now oversees Walmart's more fashion forward in house clothing brand. If some of this seems lifted from the target playbook, that should come as no surprise. Two executives toiling on the store redesign previously worked at Walmart's Minneapolis based rival, But McMillan's most audacious sales job might be his campaign to lure talent to Bentonville. For decades, its top executives ran the company out of an old warehouse, emphasizing that such no frills digs demonstrated their commitment to keeping costs low. In January, however, McMillan presided over the opening of a three hundred and fifty acre Walmart campus that looks like an offshoot of the Google Plex. The new spread is still unfinished, and as of January, many of the senior executives, including McMillan, had yet to move in. But once it's completed, Walmart's new home will include twelve renewably powered office buildings with windows scrubbed by drones, a fitness center complete with meditation rooms and pickleball courts, and a bougie suburb's worth of walkable shops and restaurants featuring a brewery, a bike store, a tapas bar, a sushi place, and a coffee shop serving up items like salted honey, oat milk flat whites. Such a monumental project with a multi billion dollar price tag might seem wildly incongruous in Bentonville. Two decades ago, it was ensconced in a dry county and had a downtown that looked very much as if it had been hollowed out by a Walmart superstore or two. Now it has an Austin in the Ozarks vibe. Just watch out for the e bikers whizzing around town, many of whom look suspiciously like coastal transplants. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is the degree to which McMillan's salesmanship has paid off, particularly at a company whose very size has made it susceptible to stagnation. Almost a decade ago, Walmart trailed not only Amazon but also eBay and Apple in online sales. Under McMillan, it's become the world's second largest e commerce company, with online sales this year expected to reach one hundred and fifteen billion dollars according to eMarketer. That's not even a quarter of Amazon's expected five hundred and thirty one billion dollars, but Walmart is catching up. Higher income shoppers also seem to be giving it another look. The company says seventy five percent of last fall's market share gain came from those with an annual income of more than one hundred thousand dollars. More store employees are staying at the company a result of its recent investments in higher wages and better benefits, with some of its most successful store managers earning more than six hundred thousand dollars each year. Its wooed executives from Google and Amazon, and last year, Walmart's shares rose by an astonishing seventy two percent, outpacing those of Costco, Kroger and Target. One wonders what Walmart's founder, Sam Walton, a notorious penny pincher who once warned that every time Walmart spends a dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customer's pockets, would have made of all this. But it's McMillan's Walmart. Now. I give him my Nobel prize, says Ram Sharan, the famed business consultant speaker. He's quiet, he doesn't talk too much, and he's been able to build Walmart into a new high growth engine. McMillan may have staved off its extinction, but perhaps no American retailer has more on the line. With Trump back in the White House, the president's promise of mass deportations raises the specter of raids at large employers, and his onslaught of tariffs will almost certainly make it harder for Walmart to honor its low price promise. With an isolationist mandate in Washington, it's probably best for McMillan to portray Walmart as the quintessential American company, always its preferred pitch, even if it's the quintessential globalized business. With more than ten thousand, six hundred stores worldwide and supply chains circling the world, including in China. He has to figure out how to be a CEO who doesn't put himself in the crosshairs of controversy with anyone his employees, his customers, or the president. Our attitude is we're here long term, he says. We're a large employer, we serve a lot of people. We want the country to thrive. Until now, every Walmart CEO has inherited Sam Walton's former office in the companies soon to be vacated Legacy Headquarters. With its wood paneled walls, dim lighting, and first floor view of the parking lot, the room looks more suitable for the head of a regional trucking company than the steward of a global retail colossus. Yet McMillan seems comfortable enough here, laid on a Friday afternoon, sitting back in a chair, legs crossed in a blue shirt, gray pants, and black shoes that look like they could have been purchased at one of his stores. The books on the shelves behind him seem to have been selected to convey a sense that he's not just a retail practitioner, but someone who's read and thought deeply about his trade. They include many about Walmart, some about rivals Amazon, Kmart and Target, and others about social issues, such as Isabel Wilkerson's best selling Caste The Origins of Our Discontents. The same shelves also hold conversation pieces, allowing McMillan to share folksy stories about how he's occasionally blundered but has always come a way wiser for it. He grabs a football dating to his time as head of Sam's Club, explaining how he pushed his executives to buy as many as possible, only to be chagrined when they arrived with black laces that customers didn't want. We marked them all down, McMillan says, so attention to detail is the lesson there. He talks about how he felt on his first day as CEO, when faced with the prospect of moving into the same office where Walmart's founder once held court. He says he was so spooped that he put it off for a day going out and visiting stores instead. It's pretty intimidating, McMillan says, I mean Sam was legendary. Walton founded the company in nineteen sixty two, and it eventually eclipsed Kmart and Sears to become the country's largest retailer. He could be pitiless as far as he was concerned. Putting mom and pop stores out of business meant they weren't doing a good enough job. Before his death in nineteen ninety two, he'd become a folk hero, one of the country's richest men. He still drove around his small town home in a dented Ford pickup and kept a shotgun in his office in case he needed to leave in a hurry to hunt quail. Never mind that in his final years he resided in a breathtakingly stylish modern home designed by a local disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was good to be sam by the Oughts. However, Walmart's shares had plateaued. Comparable store sales, a critical metric in retail, dipped checkout lines were unending. There was just this perception at the time that you'd never go to Walmart, or you'd go and you'd never find anything, or it would just be a service disaster, says Ron Thurston, author of the book Retail Pride. Walmart fought off unionization efforts in the US, but that didn't stop labor leaders and their allies from highlighting the company's then lower wages and dismal benefits. Its critics coined the term the Walmart effect to describe how they argued it was impoverishing small towns and forcing suppliers to move their operations overseas. Perhaps the lowest point for the company came in twenty twelve, when The New York Times reported that it had bribed officials in Mexico. Walmart ultimately paid nearly two hundred and eighty three million dollars in criminal and civil penalties to US federal authorities to resolve the charges. In twenty nineteen, and in what might best be described as a classic business school cautionary tale, Walmart whiffed spectacularly on the internet. It introduced Walmart dot Com in two thousand, but there always seemed to be members of the leadership team who feared that if they moved too quickly to sell stuff online, they'd cannibalize the stores. There was a pretty significant and influential pocket within the company even then that was not convinced Amazon was indeed a threat, says Vinki Harinarian, co founder of Cosmics, a search startup Walmart bought for three hundred million dollars in twenty eleven. When McMillan took over as CEO, his resume hardly suggested he'd be the company's savior. After graduating in nineteen eighty five from Bentonville High School, where he was voted most attractive, he went to work at a local Walmart warehouse. He says he remembers being impressed by a poster over the recruiting desk depicting a Walmart tractor trailer running a Kmart vehicle off the side of a mountain. I'm like, huh, this is a competitive spot, McMillan says, I like that. He got his MBA at the University of Tulsa in the early nineties and returned to Bentonville to become a Walmart buyer, where he soon witnessed how e commerce was beginning to upend retail. It was very clear to me that that was a really important part of the future, he says. There were debates internally as to how aggressive we should be, and I was all always on the aggressive side. He was promoted to CEO of Sam's Club in two thousand and five. Four years later, he became CEO of Walmart's international division and saw how quickly consumers in China were embracing shopping with their phones. By then, he was being talked about as a possible candidate to succeed company CEO Mike Duke. When it finally happened in twenty fourteen, McMillan says the first thing he did to get sales growing again was Ray's wages. At the time, many of Walmart's workers were making less than nine dollars an hour. In early twenty fifteen, McMillan announced a plan to increase starting hourly pay to ten dollars. That October, he stunned investors by telling them it would cost two point seven billion dollars. He tried to soften the blow with a twenty billion dollar share buy back plan. It didn't work. That day, Walmart lost twenty percent of its market value and McMillan was excoriated on CNBC by Mad Money host Jim Kramer. Maybe you need every penny to beat Amazon, Kramer lectured him, maybe the stock's not a good investment. The stock recovered, and McMillan set out to banish the notion within Walmart that Amazon could be ignored. I've been told I should ride around town in the afternoon and see how many of my executives have Amazon boxes on their front porch, he said to a group of them at an early meeting, according to someone there who didn't want to be identified because he wasn't authorized to speak about it publicly. In twenty sixteen, McMillan negotiated a three point three billion dollar deal for Walmart to acquire Jet dot Com, a money losing would be Amazon challenger, whose founder Mark Lore was a former Amazon executive whose eagerness to cross swords with the Seattle based company was widely known. McMillan entrusted Lore to run Walmart's entire e commerce operation and go on an acquisition spree, which led the company to buy online shopping start ups such as men's clothing site Bonobo's and outdoor retailer Moose Jaw. Mc millan found himself refereeing culture clashes between Law's team and their Walmart peers, for whom frugality and humility were essential virtues. The Jet people's idea of bonding was watching HBO's Silicon Valley during work hours. They blanched at joining their new colleagues in the Walmart cheer give me a W, give me an A, give me an L, give me a squiggly, at which point everybody joins in a collective booty shake. Lawer's enormous compensation package, dwarfing even McMillan's, also rankled Bentonville colleagues. Jet was supposed to become Walmart's e commerce brand, a vehicle to reach urban shoppers, but Walmart ended up shutting it down four years after the acquisition, later selling Bonobo's and Moosejaw instead. Lore encouraged the retailer to throw all its weight behind Walmart dot Com, which had struggled over the years because of the company's lack of commitment. Customers, it turned out, liked ordering groceries on the site and picking them up at the stores. During the pandemic, Walmart reconfigured store layouts to accommodate a flood of online orders, and that business exploded. Walmart's US e commerce sales increased seventy six percent in twenty twenty alone to fifty three billion dollars, according to e Marketer. The Jet deal brought an influx of much needed tech talent, which made it easier for the company to recruit others from Silicon Valley who might have previously turned up their noses at an offer from Bentonville. It probably didn't hurt that McMillan had established himself by then as a new kind of Walmart's CEO, smooth enough to win over Wall Street and dabble in politics. He discontinued the sale of merchandise with the Confederate flag on it, and called for state officials in Arkansas not to pass a bill limiting LGBT rights. He raised his company's already ambitious climate goals. Walmart, it seemed, was no longer the target of the kind of criticism leveled against it in the aughts. Another massive retailer, frequently accused of destroying neighborhood stores and treating its employees ungently, had taken its place. The Boogeyman, says Neil Saunders, Managing director of Global Data, is now Amazon. We'll be right back with everyday low problems. Welcome back to everyday low problems. Bethany Frankel is not the sort of person you'd expect to find praising Walmart, but in December she logged into TikTok and proceeded to do exactly that. In a video that received more than thirty two thousand likes, the former Real Housewives of New York City star revealed that the company had been selling a dupe of Irmez's hard to find and supremely coveted burkein bag. The starting price for a real burkin is around ten thousand dollars. Thanks to a third party selling on the Walmart marketplace, anyone could now buy a fake burkin a furkin for a mere eighty five dollars. As far as Frankel was concerned, Walmart was democratizing fashion. This is breaking some luxury glass ceiling, she said. In a subsequent review, Frankel revised her assessment. Holding up a bonafide burkin, she declared, this is like flying private of the furkin. This is like flying spirit in the luggage compartment. The viral furkin moment exposes the awkwardness that Walmart has sometimes had trouble navigating, trying to be both cool and mainstream, protecting supplier relationships while opening up to the anything goes chaos of a third party marketplace. The last time it attempted to cast itself as hip the gambit bombed. Metro seven was introduced in two thousand and five as what executives then described as a premium fashion brand which had twenty dollars velvet blazers and twenty four dollars pairs of distress genes and other items aimed at urban women. Walmart promoted the brand with ads in Vogue and a New York Fashion Week event in Times Square. It added organic foods years later, in what many considered an effort to become more like Target and lure more upscale shoppers, Walmart revamped stores, ditching thousands of products to make shelves less cluttered. Bargain hunters with fatter wallets who flocked to its stores during the two thousand and eight financial crisis came not in search of cheap, chic clothing, but looking for deals for toothpaste and toilet bowl cleanser. When the economy improved, those shoppers disappeared. Walmart reversed course on the ill fated store revamp, and Metro seven, not fashionable enough for upscale shoppers and too costly for Walmart's core customers, was axed. Now, the retailer is once again chasing upscale consumers, relying on similar methods. Along with another round of store reboots, Walmart put its muscle in the last several years behind two fashion forward affordable clothing lines designed under the tutelage of the company's new creative director Maxwell. During New York Fashion Week in September, celebrities like Project Runway judge Nina Garcia and female rapper Doshi emerged from SUV's in Manhattan's Meatpacking District to attend Maxwell's Spring wardrobe show, sponsored by Walmart. After models strutted about in very non everyday low priced dresses and pantsuits, guests were shuffled to an adjacent pop up store, where they sipped tequila and flipped through racks of garments. Maxwell helped imagine for Walmart's Free Assembly and scoop brands. Walmart hopes its new look will bring in more higher income shoppers. The company also acknowledges that the current uptick in those consumers has been prompted partly by inflation. The question is whether those shoppers will vanish again once the cost of a dozen eggs stabilizes. Inflation has been Walmart's friend, says Kirti Kajanam, executive director of the retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University in California. Walmart executives say the company will do a better job of cementing permanent relationships with these newer arrivals because it has something didn't the last time around. It's thriving digital business. Upscale shoppers who are more likely to be tethered to their phones and laptops and who might never want to step into a store will never have to. They can just get products speedily delivered. The retailer's third party marketplace allows it to tempt those hunting online for specific products twenty eight hundred and ninety nine dollars Gucci bags, for example, or four hundred and sixty eight dollars retro Nike Jordan's they'd likely never sell in one of their stores, and its thousands of influencers remind shoppers to keep coming back. Walmart says its online operation could finally turn a quarterly profit this year. The company is reluctant to provide much financial detail on its newer digital ventures, but UBS predicts that the company's in house advertising unit, which primarily relies on traffic on Walmart's website and mobile app, will generate about six billion dollars in sales globally this year. As for its marketplace, Emarket predicts that its US sales will top thirteen billion dollars this year, still a sliver of Amazon's anticipated three hundred and sixty billion dollars. Walmart's chief financial officer, John David Rainey says his company is moving in the right direction, but we need to be in order of magnitude bigger than what we are today. Of course, the more Walmart becomes like Amazon, the more likely it is to have Amazon like problems. When a reporter brings up the furkin, Walmart's executive vice president for Fashion, Denise in Candela, says, the buzz around the bag couldn't have been more welcome. It was a viral moment. She says, it's still a viral moment. We sold out pretty much overnight. Others at Walmart grimace when asked about it, after all, it was a fake. Tom Ward, former chief e Commerce officer at Walmart US and now head of online and Supply Chain at Sam's Club, says the reason the Ferkin is no longer available on the marketplace is that Walmart took it down if some but he describes an item as something it's just not. We're not going to let you sell it, Ward says. McMillan sounds as if he'd rather not talk about it. I'm not an expert on that subject, he says, noting he only recently heard about the fake bag. You have to talk to somebody else. When pressed, he acknowledges that opening up the retailer's digital shelves to anyone makes everything more complicated. Trying to build trust and being responsible for things in a world where you don't actually own all the inventory and make all the decisions, he says, is more challenging. Arkansas Republican governor and former Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took the stage at the unveiling of Walmart's new campus in mid January. Looking around, it's hard to believe that we're not in Silicon Valley or New York City, she said. Once it's completed, the campus will have one thousand bike parking spaces and five thousand freshly planted trees. Locally sourced mass timber, the latest and sustainable building materials, is being used in the construction of several of the buildings. A roof top bar in a Marriott AC Hotel will also open on campus, named after Sam Walton's old quail hunting spot in South Texas. I think it's safe to say that Arkansas has never had a development project like this ever before and probably ever again, Sanders said. Earlier in the day, mc millan gave a lengthy speech to employees about Walmart's move to the new campus. No reporters were allowed, but in a video Business Week obtained, mc millan shifts into blunt, motivational speaker mode. He stresses that the digital transformation that began on his watch is hardly over. We're still behind in some metrics, still behind in terms of volume, he says, but we've got momentum and we can make this work now. He doesn't specify, but it's fairly obvious what mc millan means. Amazon is expected to generate seven hundred billion dollars in revenue this year, closing in on Walmart's estimated seven hundred and nine billion dollars, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It's also been enormously expensive just to get this far, he says, pointing to a chart on the screen behind him showing how spending has driven down Walmart's operating margin. Most CEOs get fired when this happens, He says, I'd like to thank our board once again for not firing me. Bentonville's makeover from sleepy rural backwater began a decade plus ago with Sam Walton's descendants, who still control more than forty percent of Walmart's shares and as of December, had a combined fortune of four hundred and thirty two billion dollars. In twenty eleven, Sam's daughter Alice Walton, opened the more than one billion dollar Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, designed by modernist architect Mosha Safti, which features artists including Khindi Wilie, best known for his portrait of former President Barack Obama hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. The following year, members of the family back to a successful effort to overturn Benton County's dry staff. More recently, two third generation Walton's brothers, Tom and Stuart have turned Bentonville into a mountain biking mecca, creating networks of trails in the area so enviable that the US National Mountain Bike Team now calls the town home. Through their various real estate and hospitality companies. The brothers have also opened Blake Street, a private club where members can work out and then order drinks from an outdoor bar while taking a cold plunge or a dip in the pool. The Ledger, a co working space with an outdoor ramp that wraps around the building, enabling visitors to ride their bikes to their temporary spaces on all six floors rather than troubling themselves with the elevator. Lady Slipper, a cocktail bar where customers can sip the house beverage, a variation of a Negroni on tap and motto by Hilton, a boutique hotel with a popular sushi restaurant and tiki themed bar. The city's demographics are also shifting. Mayor Stephanie Orman boasts that it now has this state's first cricket field, which she says serves the influx of South Asian tech workers relocating to the area, some of whom presumably work at Walmart. We designed that around our large Indian population, she says. Still, not all Walmart employees are convinced they're going to stick around for this next chapter. In conjunction with the opening of Walmart's new campus. The company said it was closing offices in Dallas, Atlanta and other cities and requiring employees to move to Bentonville or Sunnyvale, California, to encourage in person collaboration while eliminating hundreds of positions as it consolidates corporate hubs. Several executives have already left rather than relocate, including Sam's Club's chief technology officer cheryld Ioah. On a corporate Zoom call in May, three hundred web designers, some of whom were asked to relocate, lobbed unhappy questions and concerns. As a member of the lgbt QI plus community, I don't feel safe in Arkansas, one wrote, women's rights are being rolled back there, some one else commented. One of their peers, who identifies as black and LGBT, said he'd move to Bentonville six months before, even though he and his partner had been very nervous. Their experience so far has been positive. There is community here, he wrote in the chat. On a Saturday afternoon, there's an anti abortion rally on the town square with protesters standing beside signs with slogans, one of which says the baby inside your body is not your body. They are met with an equal number of counter protesters carrying signs with slogans like abort the Patriarchy. Sitting at the bar at Motto's Sushi Spawn on a Tuesday night in January, a patron engages a Business Week reporter in a lively political conversation, volunteering that he has a safe full of guns at home. If people like himself had heeded Trump's call to descend on Washington on January sixth, twenty twenty one, he explains, there would have been a real insurrection. We might have lost, says the former Wall executive, but it would have been an insurrection. Now, of course, Trump's back and McMillan needs to figure out how to deal with his second term. Retailers like Walmart probably expect more whiplash. In one instance, during Trump's first term, the forty fifth president caused avocado prices to rise simply by threatening tariffs on Mexico. That was hardly immaterial to Walmart, which sells them along with guacamole in everything from squeeze bottles to freeze dried packages to thirty two ounce jugs. At the last minute, Trump pulled back now. His vow to slap Mexico with twenty five percent tariffs, delayed as of press time, could have Walmart customers reconsidering whether they can afford their favorite dip, especially when prices for Mexican avocados are already up fourteen percent from last year because of a drought. Tariffs on China could have similar effects. It's a prodigious supplier of clothing, furniture, appliances, and pharmaceutical ingredients. Even if tariffs are imposed, Walmart's immense buying power and its global supply chain, allowing it to source products from an array of different countries, puts it in a better position than Target or Kroger to squeeze suppliers and keep down prices. At least that's Walmart's hope. We've been dealing with tariffs for a long time. McMillan says, I think we will navigate that. There are plenty of other unknowns for him to manage his way through while trying to boost his company's sales and operating margins. Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the newly confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, wants to halt food stamps from being used to pay for soda and junk food. Walmart receives an estimated twenty six percent of all Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP spending, and shopper's grocery dollars could take a significant sales hit under such a scenario. Trump's proposed immigration restrictions, like doing away with temporary protected status for migrants from Haiti, Ukraine and other countries, could make it harder for the company to fill positions at its stores and distribution centers. Even with all that to figure out, the only time mc millan's voice starts to quiver is when he talks about leaving behind Walton's old office, which he's likely to do in May. That will be an emotional moment, he says. I try not to think about it too much, and I'll try to do it alone. I don't want anybody around. When he first moved in, he wanted to put up a white board, only to have people at the company tell him he couldn't do it because Sam didn't have one. Nope, mc millan told them Sam had a peg board. The whiteboard went up and there will be one on the wall of mc millan's new office on the third floor of a building that will surely have a better view. He probably can't wait to get there.