Everyone Shops at Walmart

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 19, 8:30AM EDT

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Everyone Shops at Walmart — © courtesy of Walmart Inc.

Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT | WMT Price Prediction) has posted its earnings, and they were close to spectacular. So was the increase in the company’s guidance. Its numbers were much better than rival Target’s. Home improvement retail giant Home Depot posted awful numbers just days ago. The Walmart figures said one thing. Almost everyone used to shop at Walmart. Now, everyone does. (These companies control over half their industries.)
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In the most recent quarter, revenue rose 7.7% to $152.3 billion. That is a staggering increase for such a large company. Walmart remains the largest company in the United States based on revenue, and it employs over a million people. Operating income rose 17.3% to $6.2 billion. U.S. same-store sales rose a muscular 7.4%, and e-commerce revenue was up 27%.
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Walmart’s revenue in the United States was up for at least two reasons. Its normal customers, who are not at the top of the U.S. income totem pole, continued to shop in its stores and online. Additionally, people with higher median incomes have turned to Walmart, which became more attractive because of inflation. In essence, Walmart is expanding its customer base.

Walmart has two important advantages over most of its rivals. It has 5,173 retail locations. It is said that 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store.
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Walmart is one of the largest, if not the largest, grocery retailers in the country. Food prices, in particular, have been hit by inflation. Low grocery prices help draw customers as well.
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For a number of years, there was concern among Walmart shareholders that it would be beaten up by Amazon or smaller brick-and-mortar retailers. That has not happened. If anything, with its expanding customer base, it has become more powerful.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.