Some 14,000 Walmart employees and shareholders gathered last Friday for the annual meeting of the world's largest retailer in Fayetteville, Arkansas, but the biggest presence at the gathering was a man who has been dead for 20 years.
A huge mosaic of Sam Walton, Walmart's founder, flickered on a giant screen in the Bud Walton Arena, home to the University of Arkansas's basketball team. Retired and current employees told stories of how they had pleased or irked Walton, while his children – including Walmart's current chairman Rob Walton – recalled how their father had put them to work in the first store he opened in neighbouring Bentonville in 1962.
Veteran observers of the annual gatherings say the company has long invoked Walton as an attempt to connect the now vast retailer – with operations stretching from China to Asda in the UK – to its roots in rural Arkansas. The focus on Sam Walton may have been even stronger than usual because the meeting also marked the company's 50th birthday.
But it was no surprise that many of this year's references to the founder came spiced with an ethical flavour. The meeting came in the wake of allegations that Walmart paid more than $20m (13m) in bribes to Mexican officials to accelerate its expansion in the Latin American country. "Our governance is rooted in the set of values that dad put in place," Rob Walton told staff and investors. The company is investigating the allegations.
Although the corruption scandal dominated the headlines from the gathering, historians of Walmart say it is another of Walton's traits – the ability to innovate – that the company is in urgent need of as consumers increasingly do their shopping online. Walmart generated less than 2pc of its sales on the web last year, according to Kantar Retail. The company still generated $443.9bn of sales and $15.7bn of profits, but analysts say the pressure on Walmart to increase its online muscle is intensifying.
Online shopping in the US is forecast to grow substantially. Sales over the web will reach $279bn by 2015 compared with $152bn in 2008, research group Forrester predicts. Worryingly for Walmart, that growth should offer online specialists such as Amazon the opportunity to compete with it on price – the retailer's strongest and, to its critics, most controversial selling point. And given the rapid growth of smartphones more of the retailer's customers, typically lower income families, are able and willing to shop online.
"To me it's an incredible area of vulnerability," says Charles Fishman, the author of The Wal-Mart Effect, a history of how the company changed retailing. "Online retailing has been there 10 years. What's going on? Why haven't they figured it out?"
The company used the gathering in Bentonville to remind everyone of its ambition to add another 100 supercentres this year to the more than 3,000 it has in the US, but it was also evident that Walmart recognises the need to get to grips with online.
Marissa Meyer, a senior executive at Google, was elected to Walmart's board in a sign that it recognises it is short of people who can help the company navigate the digital map. At a session between analysts and executives following the main event, chief executive Mike Duke encouraged analysts to direct questions to Neil Ashe. The former head of digital at US national broadcaster CBS, Ashe was hired by Walmart in January to run online retailing. "We're in the process of acquiring a really talented team in Silicon Valley," he said.
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