Walmart CEO Doug McMillon-Interview

There’s not a ton of current profiles out there, but there were a lot when you started, and it was good because it was actually super interesting. How did you get started at Walmart?
My dad was a dentist and he moved us across the state of Arkansas to open a dental practice, and then told me to get to work to pay for college and the highest paying job in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1984 was Walmart Warehouse at $6.50 an hour compared to McDonald’s at $3.35, so I chose Walmart.
So you were in the warehouses right from the beginning? It wasn’t in a store?
My first job was unloading trailers at a warehouse. I did that for a summer, and then the next summer I worked at our return center and I ended up going to school and graduate school. When I got through, I got into a merchant training program at Walmart and they put me in a Walmart store so I worked in Store #894 in Tulsa, Oklahoma as an assistant manager, and then I came into our home office in January of 1991 as the fishing tackle buyer.
So what was the most interesting product that you served as a buyer for — did you start at the peak with fishing tackle, and it was all downhill from there?
Over the years I got to do just about every category, and I loved the tech categories, doing those along with toys were a lot of fun.
So over the time, the two highlights as far as your path to the CEO job was Sam’s Club and then Walmart International. What did you learn at Sam’s Club when you were there and how was it different or similar to your experience at Walmart?
DM: Previous to the Sam’s Club CEO role, most of my career, maybe all of my Walmart career, except for the very beginning, was in merchandising, buying and selling merchandise, which I loved very much. So the job at Sam’s really stretched me to be responsible for everything from club operations to real estate, finance and all the other functions, which was a lot of fun. And I finally started to use my MBA a bit to polish off some of those skills.
When you started in 1984, this was more like v1 Walmart, I think, really specializing in small towns and they had an outside-in strategy when you look back. You went through the Supercenter revolution, what was that like now looking back as it became this behemoth, an everything-to-everyone store before The Everything Store existed? We’ll get to that in a little bit. But as you look back now, decades on, what changed at that time and what lessons, if any, did you take away from that?
I really love retail history. We started our first Supercenter in 1988, prior to that we were operating general merchandise discount stores, and we tried some big hypermarkets copied from Europe and they had failed miserably, but we tried to downsize it and make it a Supercenter and it started working. There’s a really interesting period of time from 1988 into the mid, well let’s say all the way through the end of the 1990s, where David Glass is our CEO, and we started expanding outside the United States, we had the Supercenter opportunity in the United States getting into food, which was supposed to hurt our business because it was lower margin, and then Sam’s Clubs, which we were growing, and there’s an article in Fortune Magazine about, “Walmart’s lost its way now that Sam’s passed away (Sam passed away in April of 1992) and this leadership team is going to mess it up. They’re going to get in the low margin food business, they don’t know what they’re doing outside the US, etc”. It turned out that all three of those things, the Supercenter, the Sam’s Club business and the international business, all three ended up to be really successful. But they took a lot of risk, and it taught us the importance of experimentation and also the importance of improvement every day, just constant incremental improvements.