Walmart's U.S. store sales leap 20% in past month: Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Walmart's U.S. store sales jumped 20% in the past month amid the worsening COVID-19 outbreak. Yahoo! Finance's Myles Udland and Jennifer Rogers discuss the details.

Video Transcript

JENNIFER ROGERS: I want to talk a little bit about Walmart right now. Walmart, of course, we know has seen a huge surges in sales. Just how big? Turns out around 20%. And Myles, Walmart, it's not like just they're like one store, some little store. 20% of Walmart is a ridiculous number. That is-- just the scale of that.

We had on, Dan Bartlett from Walmart, Vice President of Corporate Affairs, not that long ago. He also talked about how they're hiring. And you can see why they're hiring if they can get a number like that from Walmart.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, well I mean Walmart's annual sales are what? They're about $500 billion. So divide it by 12, and it's roughly $40 billion per month. So we're talking about a $4 billion, or $8 billion rather, increase over what they would have normally seen, so you know, pretty considerable stuff here from Walmart just in the last month. And I think it also speaks to the way we all started to process what this pandemic would be. Our first instinct was to go to the store and hoard a bunch of stuff and lock down.

And I think that is probably actually a good instinct. If you really think about what this country needs right now, we need people to not go to the store. So if people went to Walmart and Target and Costco and other places and got a bunch of supplies for two or three weeks, and then went home and they weren't technically you know, kind of locked down, they didn't get sick. They were just able to stay at home longer. That's probably a positive.

Now what happens to supply chains? Are things up and running in six weeks when you've had a lot of your suppliers run through their inventory, but then they're non-essential. So the things that they're-- you know, we've seen concerns about packaging and the little things you tie a loaf of bread together with. Like who's making those? Is that essential? All these questions are still outstanding.

But I think right now, we all saw the pictures the last couple of weekends in March of folks across the country hoarding supplies. And certainly, the sales are backing that up. I don't think Walmart is going to come out and say, we're forecasting a 20% increase over our prior guidance for the whole year. But there's no doubt that the initial panic phase here in the States that we saw during the month of March has been beneficial for Walmart, Target, Costco I think are really the three big ones, and Amazon, of course, online are really the three big winners.

JENNIFER ROGERS: Yeah, and as you mentioned online, Walmart.com rose over 30% over the past eight weeks. You need to give credit to the "Wall Street Journal" for this story. They've reviewed some documents that is showing that these store sales jumped 20% in the past month for Walmart. And again, just the scale of that maybe not a huge surprise since we've seen all the pictures, but good to have an actual number there as well.