Although we may be doing an increasing amount of shopping online, a vast majority of retail still occurs in the real world — and no event better emphasizes that fact than Black Friday, the annual holiday shopping extravaganza that consumes US retailers every Thanksgiving. Last year, Black Friday generated nearly $8 billion in sales, according to Adobe Analytics. It remains the best time of the year to get discounts on expensive electronics like 4K TVs, video game consoles, and laptops, while scores of new gadget categories like smart speakers and streaming set-top boxes have prices slashed in the hopes they get scooped up as holiday gifts.
Yet with so many deals moving online as retailers blur the lines between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there’s a growing need to try to improve the in-store experience. Many retailers, now feeling heavy competition from Amazon’s dominant e-commerce operation, are now turning to technology to incentivize consumers to skip the shipping wait times and pick up an item in-store, or at the very least order it online first.
The store best poised to capitalize on the online-offline mix of an event like Black Friday is none other than Walmart, the big-box retailer with the largest footprint in the US and one of the most sophisticated technology operations in the retail industry. Following its acquisition of Jet.com a little over two years ago, Walmart has invested significant resources into creating a cohesive hybrid online and offline operation that uses mobile apps, cloud computing, and significant logistics and analytics software. It’s all to ensure it can sell as many products across as many platforms as possible.
Walmart is turning to technology to improve its infrastructure and compete with Amazon
In retailer speak, this is called an omnichannel experience, and Walmart’s future as a viable retail behemoth hinges on its ability to serve customers wherever they want to shop at all times of the day, and especially during events like Black Friday. Of course, looming on the horizon is Amazon, Walmart’s biggest rival in retail and a company aggressively dedicated to expanding into new territories that Walmart currently dominates, like the grocery, pharmacy, and convenience store industries.
Amazon pulls in only about 40 percent of Walmart’s more than $500 billion in annual sales. But CEO Jeff Bezos’ willingness and proficiency at moving into new markets has every retailer from Walmart to CVS to Kroger looking at solutions to better modernize their businesses in the likely event Amazon continues to grow and expand. Walmart, in particular, has partnered with a number of technology companies to improve its delivery network. It’s also started working closely with Microsoft in a substantial multi-year cloud computing deal with Microsoft’s Azure platform in order to improve its online backend, as well as the many custom software elements that help it run its stores, warehouses, and data centers.
Walmart’s Jae Evans, the company’s senior vice president of global technical engineering and operations, says that an event like Black Friday is a true test of all those efforts its been making to improve its mobile, online, and in-store infrastructure. “We emulate this environment — we call it stress testing — to see how customers are coming into the store, what they’re going to be doing,” Evans told The Verge in an interview. “We run these tests quite a bit and we iterate, optimize, and we tune. We do this in a cyclical fashion, as we’re really trying to find those bottlenecks.”
Evans says Walmart has a so-called customer reliability center in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Sunnyvale, California, that’s staffed 24 hours a day in shifts during an event like Black Friday. (The center is normally staffed all hours of the day, but typically with help from overseas employees.) The ultimate goal is to make sure nothing goes terribly wrong, like Walmart’s mobile app or website crashes in the middle of the Black Friday rush, or its in-store checkout systems suffer an outage. In the event it does, Evans says, the center is capable of triaging the situation and figuring out the best way to address it, be it a network logistics issue or an actual in-store bottleneck of customers not able to enter or checkout.
“There’s a mix of some stuff, we try to get our third-party apps out of the box,” Evans says of the software tools in use at Walmart’s engineering and operations divisions. But because of the volume and scale — 4,700 physical stores and a sprawling website — “we have to build out our own set of tools,” she adds. “It’s not just the scale, but the rate of increase we experience in short period of time. We have to have that level of elasticity.”
All of this behind-the-scenes infrastructure is there to aid Walmart’s increasingly sophisticated in-store operation, a cornerstone of its ability to compete with Amazon and other existing big-box retailers. Increasingly, consumers are finding out whether a certain product is available in-store through a retailer’s website and going out to pick it up in person. Driven in part by this practice, Walmart reported a 43 percent increase in year-over-year e-commerce sales last week during its quarterly earnings report.
In some cases, consumers are finding a product on one website and seeing that it’s available cheaper in-store at another retailer, a process known as “webrooming,” a reverse of standard showrooming behavior that nearly 70 percent of US shoppers said they engage in, according to Shopify. On Black Friday, though many deals are available through Walmart’s website and the online stores of other retailers, some do remain in-store only.
Walmart is trying to make picking up items in-store as easy as possible via mobile apps
To give consumers as many possible avenues to shop, Evans says Walmart is trying something new this year: personal checkout, like the kind you get at an Apple Store. It’s officially being called Check Out with Me, and it first launched back in August as a pilot program for its outdoor lawn and garden sections at around 350 locations in the US. But Evans says the feature has since expanded to every Walmart Supercenter in the US — more than 3,000 locations — and it will be central to in-store Black Friday shopping.
Ultimately, it should help cut down on lines and checkout bottlenecks by letting customers with just one or two items get checked out by an associate on the floor running special software on a smartphone, similar to Apple’s retail approach but with full register and self-checkout systems as alternatives to manage high volume. It’s also a cheaper alternative, at least in the interim, to a more futuristic setup like the cashier-less Amazon Go. (Walmart is reportedly working on its own version of cashier-less retail technology, and Walmart-owned Sam’s Club has announced plans to open a cashier-less store in Texas where customers check out using a mobile app.)
Another strategy Evans says is Walmart’s item finder, built into its main mobile app, that gives you an easy-to-see map with pins where Black Friday products will be physically stocked. Additionally, Walmart is letting customers now return third-party products sold on Walmart.com at a physical store, instead of having to deal with the refund process online.
Walmart’s Black Friday preparations are helping it evolve its business
All of this, Walmart hopes, will improve its in-store experience and incentivize more customers to leave their homes and make the physical trip this evening, when Walmart’s Black Friday deals go live at 6PM local time, and over the weekend. But down the road, Evans says these kinds of preparations, new features, and infrastructure investments tie into the company’s greater strategy of merging online and offline retail. Eventually, more of the company’s success will hinge on its mobile apps and the ability of its network infrastructure to both manage Walmart.com and everything from grocery delivery to the Walmart Pay mobile payments service.
Grocery delivery in particular — more than half of all of Walmart’s sales are from groceries — is a particularly interesting learning experiment for Walmart, and it’s informing how it handles holiday sales and other forms of high-volume shopping. Walmart expanded its grocery delivery service from 1,000 stores to more than 2,000 in a single year, and it was only because it’s invested so much in technology that it was able to pull that off, Evans says. “That’s the kind of volumes we’re talking about,” she says. “It’s the complexity and the size that’s really helped us in understanding customer behavior.”
FULTON, N.Y. — The procession started in toys, marched through electronics, down into grocery and past the registers at the front end.
Fifty-one men and women, dressed in shimmering blue and yellow caps and gowns, walked through the Walmart to receive certificates on a stage set up in the store’s lawn and garden department. A bagpiper, wearing a kilt, led the graduates through the aisles.
For Roy Walts, it was the first time he had ever graduated from anything.
He dropped out of school in the ninth grade after his father died of cancer and his stepmother told him to leave the house. At 15, he lived in a Salvation Army clothing collection box. One Christmas night he ate cookies from a Dumpster.
So as Mr. Walts, 53, crossed the stage that April morning in front of the local mayor; Walmart’s regional manager for upstate New York; and his son, who had worked overnight stocking freezers, he had butterflies in his stomach.
“I thought for sure I would trip walking up on that stage,” recalled Mr. Walts, the automotive department manager.
Mr. Walts is a graduate of Walmart Academy, one of the largest employer training programs in the country. Since March 2016, Walmart has put more than 150,000 of its store supervisors and department managers through the training, which, over several weeks, teaches skills like merchandising and how to motivate employees.
An additional 380,000 entry-level workers have taken part in a separate training program called Pathways. Most of these workers receive a $1-an-hour raise for completing the course.
American companies spend about $170 billion a year on formal employee training, but most of that instruction focuses on workers with college degrees.
Walmart has spent $2.7 billion on training and raising wages for 1.2 million of its store workers over the past two years — an investment that reflects the pressures the company faces in the retail industry.
Fighting Amazon for sales, Walmart is trying to make its stores more pleasant places to shop. That requires a well-trained work force with a sense of purpose and self-worth, qualities that can be difficult to nurture in lower-wage workers.
But it’s not clear whether all this training is teaching workers valuable skills that could enable them to move into the middle class, or whether it is mostly making them better Walmart employees.
And even with more skills, many retail workers may never be able to earn what factory workers made in places like Fulton, a faded manufacturing hub near Syracuse.
“It is going to be very hard to replace what we’ve lost,” said Fulton’s mayor, Ronald Woodward. “Retail jobs don’t compare to manufacturing.”
In a study funded by Walmart, researchers at the National Skills Coalition, a nonprofit group that promotes investment in training, found that 60 percent of retail workers are not proficient in reading and 70 percent have difficulty working with numbers.
The Pathways program addresses some of these issues by teaching “retail” math, or basic numerical skills a worker might need at the register or stocking shelves.
The academy is geared to more-experienced supervisors and department managers. Working in classrooms set up in 150 Walmarts around the country, employees learn how to calculate profit and loss statements and how to run their department like a small business.
Managers are also taught to get to know their employees and understand their home life.
Walmart was once considered to be a pariah of rural America, vilified by some — especially people who shopped elsewhere — for wiping out local businesses by selling cheap goods made in China. Now, Walmart is rebranding itself as a company focused on the needs of its workers and the fate of small towns and hardscrabble cities.
In the past year, Walmart has spent about $650,000 running television ads about Walmart Academy, according to Alphonso, a TV data company. It has spent $17.6 million on an ad highlighting the company’s commitment to buy $250 billion in goods made or grown in America. That ad features scenes of factory workers and their families set to the squeals of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.”
“The caps and gowns, the symbolism, these are not trivial things,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
“They are trying to create this feeling among employees that ‘we are the store.’ They are taking small-town America and putting it into Walmart. Is that a bad thing? No.”
Other researchers say what many Walmart workers need most is not training, but higher wages. The training programs, they say, may be helpful in enhancing employee loyalty and performance, but increasing pay would benefit the workers most.
Two years ago, the company raised its starting wage to $9 an hour, a $1.75 increase from the federal minimum wage.
“If Walmart really wanted to invest in its workers, it would start people at $15 companywide and adequately staff its stores so they can service customers,” said Judy Conti, federal advocacy coordinator for the National Employment Law Project, which lobbies for low-wage workers.
Fulton, a city of about 11,400 people, was once known for producing one very important thing: chocolate.
Specifically, Fulton was home to a factory that made Nestlé Crunch bars. On humid days, before a summer rain, the smell of chocolate wafted through the city.
The company shut the factory and moved operations to Wisconsin in 2003 to consolidate its production facilities and “increase the utilization of assets,” a Nestlé spokeswoman said in an email.
“I think what everyone misses most,” said Geoff Raponi, manager of the Fulton Walmart Supercenter, “is the smell.”
They also miss the jobs — more than 1,500 of them when the factory was booming in the mid-1980s, according to Mayor Woodward. The local Walmart has about 300 employees.
Mac Guile, 24, was not quite 6 years old when the chocolate works closed. He was living with his grandmother, who poured molten chocolate into bars, and his grandfather, who delivered supplies to the factory. They lived in a spacious house across from a McDonald’s, where Mr. Guile was known as the store’s mascot because of his name — Mac — and the fact that he ate breakfast there almost every day.
After Nestlé left town, Mr. Guile moved with his grandparents into a trailer. There were no more daily McDonald’s breakfasts, and often there was little food at all. Mr. Guile and his younger brother took baths with water warmed on the stove.
At 19, Mr. Guile got a job at the Fulton Walmart Supercenter as a part-time janitor, earning $7.50 an hour. He didn’t have enough money to pay for utilities in his apartment for the first few months, so he showered at a relative’s house.
He now runs the meat department, a wall of refrigerated shelves, spanning from chicken thighs to Hofmann’s hot dogs, a Syracuse-area favorite.
He likes meat because of the fast pace and customer demands. He has memorized the internal temperature that pork, chicken and beef need to reach for safety, and recommends a variety of sauces and rubs.
The Walmart Academy classes appealed to Mr. Guile because they were more like discussions than lectures. Instead of being scolded for using their phones, students were encouraged to look things up. He was impressed that the program was held in a real classroom equipped with tablets.
Walmart One Best Way Program
The most useful lesson Mr. Guile learned at the academy was how to motivate his workers. “Have more one-on-one conversations, that is key,” said Mr. Guile, who has a brown beard and a tattoo that proclaims, “It is what it is.”
He now earns about $15 an hour, has a 401(k) retirement account with matching contributions from Walmart, and receives bonuses.
His former supervisor recommended him for the assistant store manager program, which could put him on track to manage a store one day — a job that pays an average of $170,000 a year.
Many of Mr. Guile’s family members also work in the store. His sister works in the deli, his cousin’s mother works at the front end and his girlfriend is a cake decorator in the bakery.
Some of his relatives who don’t work at the store ask him for help. He buys some family members new shoes and clothing for school.
“The whole town can’t work at Walmart,” Mr. Guile said.
When Fulton’s Walmart Academy graduated its first class, the store presented the mayor with a gift. It was a brick pulled from the rubble of the Nestlé factory, which is being demolished 14 years after Nestlé left.
“A piece of Nestle History,” read the inscription on the brick. “Presented this day 25th of April 2017.”
Mr. Woodward, who is serving his third four-year term as mayor, appreciates Walmart’s training program but says it will take more to save his city’s economy.
“Anytime a company offers training, that is good,” Mr. Woodward said. “But they aren’t all going to run the store.”
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Mr. Woodward, a former maintenance supervisor at Nestlé who made $89,000 a year, says he was one of the last two workers to leave the plant when it closed. His second-floor office in City Hall is like a time capsule, frozen in Fulton’s glorious industrial past.
There are black-and-white photos of a campaign banner for Theodore Roosevelt hanging over a downtown street, and of a long-gone horse racing track teeming with spectators in suits and bowler hats.
A few years ago, Fulton tried to restart chocolate production. A confectionery company, owned partly by a consortium of cocoa suppliers from Ivory Coast, revived the Nestlé property with help from the state. But the venture failed.
The site’s most recent owner stripped the factory of wiring to sell for scrap and walked away, the mayor said, leaving empty brick buildings behind.
From his office, Mr. Woodward, 68, talks on a flip phone and peers out over his glasses with eyes like an owl’s.
He is busy working to dredge a public lake that is choked by algae and closed to swimming at the height of another summer.
“I love this town,” Mr. Woodward said. “I will do anything to help it.”
That includes showing up one morning at the Walmart to attend the academy graduation.
Mr. Woodward didn’t have the heart to tell the store employees that the Walmart was not technically in his city.
The store lists a Fulton mailing address but is actually in the neighboring town of Granby. That means Fulton misses out on the property tax revenue the store generates.
The retailer does pay Fulton for water and sewage, an average of $11,703 a year, according to the city. But that pales next to the $364,218 the Nestlé plant spent on those services in 2002. The chocolate company was also paying Fulton $166,253 in annual property taxes.
Mr. Woodward appreciates that the supercenter provides steady jobs during a tough economic time. But in his mind, these are not the kind of jobs that earned Fulton the nickname “the largest small city in the state.” In the past few decades, Birds Eye foods and Miller Brewing also closed plants in the Fulton area that once employed hundreds of people.
Yolanda adams discography downloads. “You could graduate from high school, work at a place like Nestlé, buy a car and send your kids to college,” Mr. Woodward said.
When the Nestlé plant was roaring in 1985, the average wage in Oswego County, which includes Fulton, was about $51,000. Today, the average pay is 18 percent less, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a federal agency.
Walmart declined to disclose the wages at the Fulton store. But the company said that at its stores in New York State, full-time workers earned an average of $14.10 an hour. Part-time workers make an average of $11.10 an hour.
The company says its training programs are intended to help employees advance into higher-paying jobs at Walmart or in other industries.
“Whether they are coming to us for two years or 20 years, we want them to have the skills that allow them to create opportunities,” said Kathleen McLaughlin, who runs the Walmart Foundation and also holds the title chief sustainability officer.
Walmart has been working with the National Retail Federation, a trade association, to help devise standards for a certificate that retail workers could earn for gaining certain interpersonal skills like how to deal with angry customers. The hope is that certificate holders will have an easier time finding a job or getting promoted.
The challenge is that there are only so many jobs that a retail worker can be promoted to — which means many workers may not be able to move up. Since the start of the year, about 71,000 jobs have been lost in the retail sector nationwide.
Walmart points out that more than a quarter of its 1.2 million store workers are in supervisory and manager positions and that there are frequently openings for managerial jobs.
And Walmart workers who stay in entry-level jobs over many years can earn up to $17 an hour nationwide.
Activists and unions say the starting wage should be higher. But Ms. McLaughlin, who worked for two decades at McKinsey, the global consulting company, said increasing entry-level wages could do more harm than good. If the starting wage is too high, she said, employers will be less likely to hire unskilled, inexperienced workers.
“In contrast to only increasing wages,” Ms. McLaughlin said in an email, “we believe investing in people and developing their skills gives them access to more choice of jobs that reflect their particular talents and passions.”
About a month ago, Ashley VanHorn was stocking shelves in the Fulton store when she overheard two little girls tell their father they wanted to work at Walmart one day.
“You can do better than this,” Ms. VanHorn recalled the man telling them.
Working at Walmart was never part of Ms. VanHorn’s plan, either. She remembers going with her father to register at Cayuga Community College in Fulton. They rode their bikes to the campus because they didn’t have a car.
Ms. VanHorn, 27, described her father as someone “who could build a house with his bare hands” but had faced some financial challenges. He was so insistent on enrolling his daughter in college that he filled out most of the paperwork himself.
Ms. VanHorn wanted to be a social worker, but a few credits shy of getting her degree, she became pregnant and dropped out of college. Soon after, she got a job at Walmart.
“I know I let my dad down,” she said.
She started out in the health and beauty department and eventually moved to grocery, where she now manages dry goods. Her manager says Ms. VanHorn, who earns about $15 an hour, has what it takes to be a salaried assistant manager overseeing several departments and making nearly $20,000 more a year.
But Ms. VanHorn worries that the longer hours as an assistant manager would mean less time with her two children. She also hopes to go back to college someday.
On graduation day, Ms. VanHorn didn’t know what to expect. Like many of the graduates in her Walmart Academy class, she had never taken part in a graduation ceremony because she didn’t finish high school.
As the procession made its way through the aisles and the bagpiper played, Ms. VanHorn spotted her father, sitting on a folding chair in the lawn and garden section.
After the ceremony, he told Ms. VanHorn he was proud of her.
“This was not the dream,” she said. “But the dream does change.”
Having tried the experience out at home, it is brilliant. Admittedly, and as my colleagues and I discussed in our below videocast this week, while the experience does have some drawbacks, namely load time and an authentic look and feel, the real brilliance of the Walmart Toy Lab is not what it is today, but what it elucidates in terms of how Walmart is thinking about the future (go to time stamp 7:54 to listen).
Last week, in a piece comparing Amazon and Facebook, I introduced the concept of the 'horizontal line' of social commerce, a term I picked up from my colleague Carter Jensen.
The point of the concept is that retail is a race to connect the horizontal lines pictured above from end-to-end. The easiest way to think about this is to think of a social network, like Facebook, on the one end and a commerce platform, like Amazon, on the other end. Whatever entity controls the entire horizontal ultimately has the most powerful data going because not only does it mean that a company has an understanding of consumers' explicit desires via search but also an implicit understanding of their desires via social media too.
The Walmart Toy Shop is important then because it shows that Walmart may be starting to think along these lines, and specifically Walmart may now be examining how to leverage user-generated video content to carve out a niche within its own expanse of the horizontal. Walmart's collaboration with Eko gives Walmart a platform to experiment with creating a user-generated social network of activities around the products it sells. Right now, the platform is about toys, but it could extend far beyond toys and into other categories down the road.
Too heady? Well, let's get into even more video to show you further what all this means. Take a look at the below video of the phenomenon that is Ryan ToysReview:
Little Ryan is a YouTube celebrity. He unboxes toys at a rapid pace, his parents often join in the festivities, he has over 17 million subscribers (not a misprint) and his videos generate a reported $11 million a year in pretax income.
Crazy, right? Crazy like a fox that is.
Imagine what it could mean then if Walmart could create a platform for kids across America to interact with each other in a safe way and then create videos, similar to Ryan's, with even more ease?
It could be game changing.
The user-generated activity Walmart's cast of kids could produce could live on YouTube, on Facebook, and almost anywhere. With the quick presses of a few buttons, Walmart could take the youngest shoppers in America watching these videos (and their parents) from discovery-to-buy in nanoseconds. In the end, it doesn't even matter where the content lives as long as Walmart can collect the data, get people to purchase quickly, fulfill orders, and do it in a way that feels authentic, which should be easy since it is the user generating the content him or herself that captures the imagination of viewers, not Walmart.
Here's the kicker -- what was just described above can also be done with more than toys too. It can be done with any product, anywhere, anytime. This video of GH Lab, Amazon's current collaboration with Good Housekeeping at the Mall of America, shows just how far the social commerce rabbit hole could go:
What the video shows is that the operational dynamics of physical retailing can be reconceptualized via scan-and-go mobile technology. The barriers to entry surrounding a physical retail operation, like inventory and store payroll, will go down significantly because stores can be stood up in moments via showroom inventory and low touch staffing models, with scan-and-go mobile apps acting as plug-in into a fulfillment network.
All the Ryan-like YouTube stars or maybe even down the road, all the future 'Walmart Stars' (my quotes), can suddenly stand up their own shops, plug into Walmart's fulfillment networks and then voila!
The next thing the public knows is that Ryan isn't just a YouTube celebrity anymore. He is instead a modern day reimagination of Toys 'R' Us and quite possibly the most powerful physical toy retailer in the world too, and Walmart, Amazon, or someone else simply sits back and takes a cut of it all.
Walmart could even carve out spaces within its own stores for Ryan to do this himself -- via YouTube shop-in-shops right at a Walmart entrance during the holidays. Or, even crazier, Walmart could dedicate space to allow individual creators to come in on the weekends and to upload their own content into the Toy Lab right from aisle J19. The toy manufacturers could even supply the props.
Talk about creating supercharged social commerce and sticky network effects.
This future is coming. Give it two, three years tops before the industry starts to see the described above play out in front of its very eyes.
Will it be Walmart who leads the charge? Quite possibly. Because the Walmart Toy Lab shows that Walmart is investing in the future and could be years ahead of its legacy retail brethren.
But, on the flipside, the discussion also highlights how any retailer who is not thinking like Walmart, who is not experimenting with how it plans to play within the emerging horizontals of social commerce, is not just behind but is also, quite possibly, already dead upon arrival.
Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the U.S., and has 2.2 million employees around the world.
But at least a handful of those workers say they've lost their jobs for insane reasons.
One employee claimed she was let go for saving a puppy, while another tried to fight back against the Black Friday masses and lost her job.
Other employees were supposedly axed for less noble pursuits.
For throwing around iPads and posting a video of it online.
Walmart fired employees at a Kentucky store who posted a video of themselves throwing and dropping boxes containing iPads in the storeroom, according to NBC News.
'Hope nobody buys that,' one said.
Walmart said it was embarrassed at the behavior, telling NBC News, 'It made us wince.'
For stopping an armed robber.
Walmart supposedly fired four employees who managed to disarm a robber at a Utah store, according to the Consumerist.
The thief was allegedly trying to steal a netbook, and when the employees confronted him, he pulled out a handgun.
Walmart policy states that employees are required to 'disengage' and 'withdraw' if a customer presents a weapon.
For praying with a crying customer.
A pharmacist sued Walmart for religious discrimination, claiming she was canned for praying with a customer (and getting caught on camera).
The video supposedly showed the pharmacist touching the hand of the customer, who was crying, according to ABC News.
The employee said she was merely helping a patient, not praying. But she did not dispute that she prayed 'with customers when requested to do so,' ABC reported.
For defending herself on Black Friday.
A 22-year veteran Walmart greeter says she was dismissed after a Black Friday fight in the store.
The greeter claimed a woman shoved her in the aisle. Either to keep balance or defend herself, she grabbed the woman's sweater, she told the Tampa Bay Times.
'Walmart was like my home,' she told the Tampa Bay Times. 'Like my family.'
For saving a puppy, though Walmart denies this report.
The company denied the report, but an Examiner story claimed that an employee was reprimanded by a supervisor after trying to help a 'scared and hungry and cold' dog that wandered into the store in Oregon.
The manager supposedly told the employee to put the puppy back outside after she tried to call a rescue group and told her to 'get out.'
For using medical marijuana.
A Michigan employee says he was let go after using medical marijuana for pain he was feeling from an inoperable brain tumor, according to NBC News.
The employee had a prescription for marijuana and said he never went to work high or used it during work, according to NBC News.
The employee was drug tested after suffering a knee injury on the job. Walmart told NBC News that the situation 'unfortunate.'
For ranting on social media.
A 60-year-old greeter claimed he was fired in Virginia after posting a potentially offensive Facebook status.
The status read: 'Better health care means that disabled and chronically ill people live longer.' … Reader's Digest … But is that a good thing?,' according to local news site WDBJ7.
The greeter was allegedly let go after a woman complained to Walmart about the post, WDBJ7 reported.
For talking with employees after hours.
One Walmart supervisor was shown the door in 2011 for 'off-the-clock work,' which isn't allowed at the superstore chain.
During an investigation into allegations the supervisor made that employees were biased against her, she called an employee after hours and chatted for 90 minutes— in part, to talk about work. AOL Jobs reported.
Walmart said the employee had to be paid for the off-the-clock time and fired the supervisor for not following company regulations.
For stopping a shoplifter.
A customer service manager was terminated in Kansas for confronting a man she saw attempting to steal a computer, according to The Wichita Eagle.
The manager asked to see the man's receipt after he set off an alarm. The man punched and kicked her before ditching the computer, The Eagle reported.
The next day, the manager let go. The company said only asset protection employees are allowed to stop potential shoplifters.
For abusing a Muslim co-worker.
A South Carolina employee was let go after calling a Muslim co-worker a derogatory name, grabbing her arm and threatening to cut her throat, according to the Charlotte Observer.
The employee was fired after the co-worker reported the incident to a manager.
For taking four sick days in six months.
A former journalist who worked at Walmart for a year sent Gawker an angry letter, claiming she was fired from the store.
She said she was canned for taking four sick days in six months, but she seemed happy to never have to work there again.
'I just couldn't waste one more second of my life in that soulless corporate hellhole,' she wrote. 'There's only one way to go from now on and that's up.'
For eating Oreos.
A 63-year-old employee in Indiana was terminated after being caught eating Oreos in a store aisle, ABC News reported.
Management discovered the crime on tape after finding an empty Oreo wrapper in the store aisle and looking through security footage.
She was arrested for felony theft, and told an investigator she didn't have the funds to buy the cookies herself, according to ABC News.
For pretending to be a reporter.
A Walmart public relations representative was let go after she posed as a college journalism student.
The incident took place during a labor union event that was aimed at helping Walmart workers organize, according to the Huffington Post.
She used a fake name to sign in and interview employees. Walmart fired her and said they didn't approve of her tactics.
You've seen ridiculous ways to lose your Walmart job..
Having tried the experience out at home, it is brilliant. Admittedly, and as my colleagues and I discussed in our below videocast this week, while the experience does have some drawbacks, namely load time and an authentic look and feel, the real brilliance of the Walmart Toy Lab is not what it is today, but what it elucidates in terms of how Walmart is thinking about the future (go to time stamp 7:54 to listen).
Last week, in a piece comparing Amazon and Facebook, I introduced the concept of the 'horizontal line' of social commerce, a term I picked up from my colleague Carter Jensen.
The point of the concept is that retail is a race to connect the horizontal lines pictured above from end-to-end. The easiest way to think about this is to think of a social network, like Facebook, on the one end and a commerce platform, like Amazon, on the other end. Whatever entity controls the entire horizontal ultimately has the most powerful data going because not only does it mean that a company has an understanding of consumers' explicit desires via search but also an implicit understanding of their desires via social media too.
The Walmart Toy Shop is important then because it shows that Walmart may be starting to think along these lines, and specifically Walmart may now be examining how to leverage user-generated video content to carve out a niche within its own expanse of the horizontal. Walmart's collaboration with Eko gives Walmart a platform to experiment with creating a user-generated social network of activities around the products it sells. Right now, the platform is about toys, but it could extend far beyond toys and into other categories down the road.
Too heady? Well, let's get into even more video to show you further what all this means. Take a look at the below video of the phenomenon that is Ryan ToysReview:
Little Ryan is a YouTube celebrity. He unboxes toys at a rapid pace, his parents often join in the festivities, he has over 17 million subscribers (not a misprint) and his videos generate a reported $11 million a year in pretax income.
Crazy, right? Crazy like a fox that is.
Imagine what it could mean then if Walmart could create a platform for kids across America to interact with each other in a safe way and then create videos, similar to Ryan's, with even more ease?
It could be game changing.
The user-generated activity Walmart's cast of kids could produce could live on YouTube, on Facebook, and almost anywhere. With the quick presses of a few buttons, Walmart could take the youngest shoppers in America watching these videos (and their parents) from discovery-to-buy in nanoseconds. In the end, it doesn't even matter where the content lives as long as Walmart can collect the data, get people to purchase quickly, fulfill orders, and do it in a way that feels authentic, which should be easy since it is the user generating the content him or herself that captures the imagination of viewers, not Walmart.
Here's the kicker -- what was just described above can also be done with more than toys too. It can be done with any product, anywhere, anytime. This video of GH Lab, Amazon's current collaboration with Good Housekeeping at the Mall of America, shows just how far the social commerce rabbit hole could go:
What the video shows is that the operational dynamics of physical retailing can be reconceptualized via scan-and-go mobile technology. The barriers to entry surrounding a physical retail operation, like inventory and store payroll, will go down significantly because stores can be stood up in moments via showroom inventory and low touch staffing models, with scan-and-go mobile apps acting as plug-in into a fulfillment network.
All the Ryan-like YouTube stars or maybe even down the road, all the future 'Walmart Stars' (my quotes), can suddenly stand up their own shops, plug into Walmart's fulfillment networks and then voila!
The next thing the public knows is that Ryan isn't just a YouTube celebrity anymore. He is instead a modern day reimagination of Toys 'R' Us and quite possibly the most powerful physical toy retailer in the world too, and Walmart, Amazon, or someone else simply sits back and takes a cut of it all.
Walmart could even carve out spaces within its own stores for Ryan to do this himself -- via YouTube shop-in-shops right at a Walmart entrance during the holidays. Or, even crazier, Walmart could dedicate space to allow individual creators to come in on the weekends and to upload their own content into the Toy Lab right from aisle J19. The toy manufacturers could even supply the props.
Talk about creating supercharged social commerce and sticky network effects.
This future is coming. Give it two, three years tops before the industry starts to see the described above play out in front of its very eyes.
Will it be Walmart who leads the charge? Quite possibly. Because the Walmart Toy Lab shows that Walmart is investing in the future and could be years ahead of its legacy retail brethren.
But, on the flipside, the discussion also highlights how any retailer who is not thinking like Walmart, who is not experimenting with how it plans to play within the emerging horizontals of social commerce, is not just behind but is also, quite possibly, already dead upon arrival.