Fortune Article: Why Walmart’s CEO Is Taking His Billion Dollar Risks
Walmart’s CEO, Doug McMillon is taking
huge risks at in the world’s largest public company. Before it pays off, these changes
will cost him millions of dollars. One
change is raising the pay of entry-workers and department managers. He did this because Walmart was receiving bad
reviews and low scores on surveys. Because of these reviews, shoppers were
visiting Walmart less. To keep customers away from competition, McMillon is
trying to improve the experience customers receive at the stores. Paying
employees more will keep them happy, but also increase the Walmart’s yearly
costs by over 1 billion dollars. Another change was to offer employees more
training. Offering training would attract a different type of worker who are
looking for a career, and not just short-term job. To train more employees,
Walmart created 200 new training sites. The final change that McMillon made was buying
out Jet.com for 3.3 billion dollars. He
made this change to help Walmart compete with the second-level of online
retailing. Because of the risks McMillon took, sales and customer satisfaction
are rising. McMillon is taking huge
risks with these very high costing changes but he feels that is the only hope
Walmart has left in the retail market.
