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Walmart Unveils 'Store No. 8' Tech Incubator In Silicon Valley (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is creating a technology-startup incubator in Silicon Valley to identify changes that will reshape the retail experience, including virtual reality, autonomous vehicle and drone delivery and personalized shopping. The incubator will be called Store No. 8, a reference to a Wal-Mart location where the company experimented with new store layouts. Marc Lore, chief executive officer of Wal-Mart's e-commerce operations, announced the incubator Monday at the ShopTalk conference in Las Vegas. The world's biggest retailer has been overhauling its online team to better challenge Amazon.com Inc. with greater selection and lower prices. Lore founded Jet.com, which Wal-Mart purchased in September for about $3.3 billion in pursuit of Amazon in the e-commerce race. Lore said Wal-Mart has an advantage over "pure play" e-commerce companies because of its large network of stores that attract shoppers for such items as fresh food. The incubator will partner with startups, venture capitalists and academics to promote innovation in robotics, virtual and augmented reality, machine learning and artificial intelligence, according to Wal-Mart. The goal is to have a fast-moving, separate entity to identify emerging technologies that can be developed and used across Wal-Mart.
Before you laugh, some history ... Walmart is/was a tech leader, they pioneered digitizing and automating the supply chain (orders, payments, etc) and inventory management (what, where, etc) back in the 1970s. They were also mining "big data" back then (more what and where - hurricane warning in gulf, move pop tarts from midwest distribution centers to gulf stores). Opening their "big data" is how they got suppliers to buy into their digital supply chain. Suppliers got to see their product sale at national, regional and even store levels with 15min granularity. All the cash registers reported to a store's minicomputer which then connected by satellite to headquarters to report sales.
Me, I like the low prices.
If you want to spend your extra dollar, maybe give it to a charity?
Even if you aren't after low prices, GP's argument, while a popular sentiment, is also false.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...
TL;DR: Walmart (and other big box retailers) actually do pay higher wages to the line workers than typical mom and pop stores. Furthermore, unlike mom and pop shops, there are actually opportunities for promotion at a walmart. A typical general manager at walmart sits in the $100k/year range, and the lower level store managers aren't much lower. At a mom and pop retailer however, you'd be lucky if you made it anywhere past being a cashier or stocking shelves. Why? Because most family owned businesses typically assign valuable positions only to family members.
As for GP's comment about Walmart treating suppliers bad, without knowing the specifics, I have a feeling that GP is talking about how Walmart has always lead the way in terms of making its supply chain more efficient, something that started with the barcode:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
And of course, remember how during the 90's, video games (especially PC games) came in boxes the size of a cereal box, but were mostly empty? Walmart alone changed that by establishing packaging requirements in order for a supplier to be allowed to put anything on their shelves. And yeah, you're damn right the supplier will hate it because they can't make their product bigger and more eye catching than their competitors, however in terms of being less environmentally wasteful, and ultimately reducing costs to the consumer, it totally made sense.
Saving money isn't bad, and in many cases it means you're being more efficient and more practical.