Name: The Expensive Decision Walmart’s CEO Made That Changed Everything | WSJ
Uploaded: 2026-02-08T02:42:22.000Z
Duration: 7 min 15 s
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I'm a Walmart associate, and I've been around for a long time.

The superlative

For 35 years, Doug McMillan has worked at Walmart, the last 12 as CEO in charge of the country's largest retailer.

My dad told me to make some money to pay my way through school.

McDonald's, Kraft, Walmart were the three employers of young people here in Bentonville at the time.

The Kraft cheese plant didn't call me back.

McDonald's paid 335 and Walmart paid 650.

He first joined as an hourly worker in a warehouse in the summer of 1984, after his junior year of high school.

You know, first and foremost, I think the company's in great hands.

When McMillan became CEO, a lot of people didn't like Walmart very much, and sales were weak.

To many, it was a poor employer and seller of cheap stuff.

McMillan focused on improving stores, raising wages, and online growth.

On the eve of his last day as CEO, McMillan sat down with the Wall Street Journal.

At the time, I was really interested in E Commerce, as were some of the rest of us.

But the first thing that had to be done was to get the supercenter comps growing.

And I traveled around the country and asked our associates what needs to happen, and

You need to give us some schedule certainty.

You need to get the inventory out of the back room and get back to everyday low price.

The team and I brought that plan back to our board in 2014 and said, the bad news is it's really expensive.

And the board said, we agree with that plan.

In fact, we think you should be more aggressive.

And once those changes started to take place, we started to get some momentum in the Super Centers, which gave us breathing room to get more aggressive in E Commerce.

You know, in those early years, you made some big acquisitions.

Looking back now, we've sort of ended up where you began, which is Amazon is closing most of its physical stores, and

you've grown incredibly on a grocery business online, too.

We thought in the United States we could win food.

people were saying, well, you're not going to put bananas in a brown box and ship them through FedEx.

So how would you even do E Commerce food?

But we knew there was a way to do this that would leverage the stores and would involve last mile Delivery.

Back in 2016, Warren Buffett started to sell his Walmart stock and I think got out of Walmart by 2018 around there got a lot of attention at the time.

I like him a lot and I've been blessed to spend some time with him.

So when he started selling, it hurt my feelings, but I didn't say anything.

We just went about our business and I had confidence that our plan would work.

I finally called him and I said, Warren, I just have to know, is it me?

And he basically said, retail is changing so much and E Commerce is the future and I just don't know what to make of brick and mortar retail anymore.

And I said, well, I respect that there is a lot of change going on, but

we're going to be one of the winners and I hope to see you soon.

I've seen him a few times since then, but I would never bring that up.

But I wish he had stayed in because he would have done well.

You're known for being a pretty calm person and having a calm leadership style.

Obviously you're in a very stressful job.

How do you manage your own stress and I think in modern terms, your own mental health through all of this?

Sometimes people will say the CEO job can be lonely and I can kind of understand that if you let it be.

The things that have been hard have been the things you can't control.

Like the shooting in El Paso was the worst day I ever had working at Walmart.

And our associates did an amazing job recovering from that.

There are things like that that you can't control, that you have to lead through.

That allows people to take risks and be weak sometimes and fail.

But also keep working hard and doing good work.

You can't be a buyer at Walmart without making mistakes.

So you learn how to say, yeah, I messed that up, that price is wrong or that item's wrong and I'm fixing it.

And if My approach is that way, then everyone else can feel safe doing that.

As someone who has faced this dilemma many times in your career, what role do you think CEOs should play in society and in speaking out?

I don't get up every day thinking about politics.

I get up every day thinking about how we serve customers better and thinking about our associates.

They're people though, and these issues matter to them.

And so what happened over a period of years is there were things that occurred where our own associates were like, we want to hear something from you on this subject.

And a number of things happened in a series that led businesses to commenting more often.

In my case, I should be doing everything I can from a practical point of view to make people that work at Walmart feel heard and included.

They've got to be happy or customers won't be happy.

Do you think CEOs should be speaking out about what happened in Minneapolis the last few weeks?

Some have, and I think that's appropriate.

Most of them are in Minnesota, which makes sense.

I think everybody's gonna make their own choice about what they say and how they say it.

Sometimes a private conversation is more effective than a public statement.

Sometimes if it's already been said, there's not a lot of value in adding even more to it.

What are in your mind, the biggest challenges that you worry about for Walmart in the future?