Sources: Walmart is considering new growth strategies like selling shopper data to advertisers and renting out edge computing capacity in retail “supercenters”
Walmart is betting on a future where its giant stores will quickly get groceries to your door …
Wall Street JournalSarah Nassauer
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2019, Walmart was already rethinking what its big-box footprint is for: it had been rolling out Pickup Towers and shelf-scanning robots across US stores (store tech expansion), while Amazon's cashierless experiments in larger formats signaled that retail real estate itself was up for repurposing. The new reporting adds two monetization ideas on top of that base — selling shopper data to advertisers and renting out spare edge computing capacity inside supercenters.
First-order effects
Advertisers would gain a new first-party shopper-data source spanning Walmart's grocery-heavy traffic, giving brands targeting options tied directly to purchase behavior.
Renting supercenter compute would put Walmart's facilities into direct competition with cloud providers for workloads that need to sit close to users.
Second-order effects
The edge-rental idea builds logically on Walmart's own infrastructure claims — by 2022 it reported running a hybrid cloud with roughly 10,000 edge nodes nationwide, cutting costs double-digit percentages annually — so external tenants would be monetizing capacity Walmart built to serve itself.
Rivals with comparable footprints and loyalty data, Target and Amazon foremost, would face pressure to match both the retail-media and local-compute offers or cede advertiser budgets to Walmart.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, the supercenter stops being purely a store and becomes a multi-tenant node — part fulfillment hub, as later dark-store warehouse tests suggest, part data asset, part compute site — with retailers competing against hyperscalers for proximity-based workloads.
Shopper-data monetization at this scale invites regulatory scrutiny of how retail first-party data is collected and sold, making privacy rules a structural constraint on the retail-media business model.
The trend: Retailers are converting physical store networks into monetizable infrastructure — data, media, and edge compute — eroding the line between commerce and cloud.
#DigitalFirst strategy means leveraging existing physical asset to implement digital business models. Walmart seems to be moving into that direction, leveraging its super store, rather than imitating Amazon's digital native play. https://www.wsj.com/...
It seemed to me the most important assets to leverage was the ubiquitous store base and logistics expertise https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
So what's the new plan: “Walmart wasn't going to win by building an unprofitable e-commerce operation or other stand-alone ventures. Instead, its supercenters could be the heart of a web of businesses all working together to attract shoppers and drive profits.” pic.twitter.com/xT…
“Added warehouse and shipping capacity could be sold to third-party sellers, to allow more companies to easily sell their wares on http://Walmart.com .” pic.twitter.com/mqJLfWNygB
Interesting piece on Walmart's e-commerce strategy, essentially replicating Amazon's but using supercenters as the assets to build 3P marketplace and edge (vs cloud) computing services https://www.wsj.com/...
Walmart's new strategy to compete with @Amazon; less Vudu, more Supercenter as a hub for services. @Walmart is also looking for additional profits far beyond retail like edge computing (Think next generation cloud computing. Sound familiar?). https://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ
Using store-based edge computing, “Hypothetically, autonomous car makers could contract with Walmart to do on-the-fly, fast calculations in cars driving through town, hopping on and off various stores' systems. Around 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart...” 1/4 htt…
Walmart is now workin to grow faster, profitably. It plans add e-commerce warehouse capacity to hv more of its prods available for next day delivery. Like Amazon, Walmart wl invest in more capacity to offer fulfillment & warehousing fr 3rd party merchants https://www.wsj.com/...