Walmart Quietly Built a $7 Billion Ad Business In Aisle Three
If you walked into a Walmart on a Tuesday afternoon last week, you would have seen exactly what you expected. Families pushing carts past pallets of bottled water. A teenager restocking bananas. Self-checkout lines snaking past the registers. Nothing about the experience suggests that the company running this store just posted earnings that look less like a supermarket chain and more like a Silicon Valley platform.
But on May 21, when Walmart released its first-quarter numbers under brand-new CEO John Furner — who took the corner office from Doug McMillon in February — the headline figure was a respectable 4.1% growth in US comparable sales (the standard retail measure of how much existing stores grew, stripping out new openings). That's a solid number. It's also not the interesting one.
The interesting numbers were buried deeper. Advertising revenue jumped 36%. E-commerce grew 26%. Walmart+, the company's Amazon Prime-style subscription service, hit a record number of new members. Put together, they tell a story most shoppers — and frankly, most investors — haven't quite absorbed yet: the world's largest retailer is quietly turning into something else entirely.
Here's the question worth sitting with: what happens when the boring, lowest-margin business in America becomes the front door to one of the highest-margin businesses in tech?
