Walmart says stores give it an edge over Amazon



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Walmart Inc. General Manager Doug McMillon said on Monday that the thousands of stores in the discount chain were giving it the distribution power it needed to compete with its e-commerce rivals, including Amazon.com .

While Walmart has assigned 20 fulfillment centers specifically to support its e-commerce business, compared to 100 for Amazon, the retailer's 4,500 stores give it an edge in accelerating shipments, food, and more. McMillon to FortuneBrainstorm Tech Conference in Aspen, Colorado.

This is particularly crucial for Walmart's $ 170 billion food business, making it by far the largest grocer in the US. Not only are the stores closer to customers, but the use of store inventory offers Walmart another chance to sell items and waste less money.

"One of the realities of fresh and perishable foods is that if you do not sell them, you throw them out or give them away," McMillon said. "When you have a shop environment and you have fresh or perishable food so close to people, these stores then become double-store stores and centers of choice." Collection Centers are those facilities in which the goods are used to execute online orders for delivery or pickup. The CEO said that 60% of Walmart stores "work this way and that is an advantage for us". Amazon operates a few stores other than its Whole Foods chain.

The largest retailer in the world now offers grocery collection at 3,100 stores in the United States and by the end of the year will be offering same-day grocery delivery at 1,600 stores. And McMillon added that Walmart learns the lessons learned to the extent that it compromises the delivery of food and the pickup helps it learn how to use the stores to process nonfood orders more efficiently.

Walmart, who conceded McMillon as falling behind Amazon and had to play the catch-up game, could reap all the benefits he could find. According to recent eMarketer data, Amazon accounts for 37.7% of all online retail sales in the United States, compared with 4.7% for Walmart.

Admittedly, Walmart's digital sales have risen sharply, rising 37 percent in the first quarter, and are expected to reach about $ 21 billion this year on Wall Street.

McMillon played down a recent report in recoding That said, there was tension among Walmart executives over the pace of growth in its e-commerce and its difficulties in limiting losses. (Morgan Stanley recently estimated that Walmart's eCommerce losses this year would rise to $ 1.7 billion this year.) He joked that he and Marc Lore had sold jet.com to Walmart in 2016 for $ 3 billion and now run Walmart's US e-commerce, always loved one of the other.

At the conference, which coincided with Amazon's Prime Day Sale, Mr. McMillon admitted that he admired the rival company's focus on "accelerating convenience-driven about the customer in terms of innovation ".

"We are not proud, we are not selfish.If someone does better than us, copy and paste when we should and when we can," he said. Brainstorm Tech.

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