Winner Sells All by Jason Del Rey

Author:Jason Del Rey [Rey, Jason Del]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2023-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

9

The Greatest Retailer on the Planet

Greg Foran was exasperated. He was seated in a conference room inside Walmart’s Bentonville, Arkansas, home office on what must have felt like the millionth conference call with the retailer’s supposed e-commerce savior, Marc Lore.

Foran was the CEO of Walmart’s entire US operation—namely, its 4,700-plus stores—and he had been skeptical about the Jet.com acquisition from the start. He knew full well the history of turnover at the top of Walmart’s e-commerce organization, as well as Lore’s penchant for focusing on sales growth over profits. And he understood the impact that Lore’s tactics might have on the overall Walmart US business he ran and the investments he could make in stores.

Now Foran was impatient as Lore babbled on about some pie-in-the-sky e-commerce initiative from the other end of the line. Foran pressed his finger against the mute button on his side of the line and lit into Lore to those assembled around the same Bentonville conference table. This guy doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, was the gist of Foran’s diatribe.

The observer who relayed the account to me years later couldn’t recall the specifics of the initiative Foran was disgusted with. But the more crucial point was that Foran, one of the most-respected retail leaders on the planet, was reaching his tipping point, and it seemed that Lore was the one pushing him closer to the edge.

The Retail King

There had been hope in the beginning. Foran and Lore had gotten together in 2016, back in the early days of the Walmart-Jet marriage, to try to make things work. They had been prodded by Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who needed the two leaders to mesh for this grand experiment to pan out. The duo spent hours brainstorming ideas on a whiteboard before the deal was even consummated, sketching out ways that Walmart’s four-thousand-plus stores could benefit from an e-commerce savant like Lore and how the company’s performance in online retail might get a boost with insight and attention from the brick-and-mortar retail brilliance of Foran.

“When I first got to know Greg, and we’re talking, and mapping stuff out, we got along really, really well,” Lore told me. “And he was so happy that it was different than the regime before . . . we were communicating, we were talking; I guess they didn’t really talk much before that.”

Some of Foran’s actions gave e-commerce leaders hope that he would buy into their vision. Case in point: at one point soon after the Jet acquisition, he gave tentative approval for a project that his own teams thought he never, ever would: combining the retailer’s two separate shopping apps. One was the app that customers could use to order fresh groceries from a local Walmart store, and then have them ready curbside for pickup on the same day. Since the orders were packed by store employees, Foran’s teams oversaw physical operations for the program and considered the initiative a point of pride. The other app was the general

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