President and CEO of Walmart US talks on the company's future and inflation

according to the latest Department of Labor report the US has seen 39 straight months of job growth that is sending unemployment to a nearly 50-year low and now Walmart the world's largest retailer is advancing its push to offer corporate jobs that do not require college degrees at ABC News business reporter Alexis christofer sat down with the president and CEO of Walmart Us in an exclusive interview and she joins us now from Washington with the latest on this story good to see you my friend what did you learn good to see you guys thanks so much look some Walmart storm managers can now make over $400,000 a year no college degree necessary it's part of the retailers push to offer higher paying corporate jobs to non- col grads this morning I sat down with the president and CEO of Walmart Us in this exclusive interview to talk about that and more why did Walmart decide to remove college degree requirements from some of these higher paid corporate jobs you know I look at this a couple ways there are so many different ways that people will find their own path to success you know for some of us that means college for some of us it means skills and the skills there are a number of ways that we want to help people attain the skills to be really successful at their job at Walmart or just skills in life and so you know many cases what the skills required to do something like be a store manager or be an assistant manager in a distribution center be a technician on robotics you know those are skills that are are pretty specific um they can be a combination of leadership or business acument and we have a lot of programs where we want to make sure people have the skills they need to be successful recognizing that that while college is great for some it's not exactly the right answer for everyone we have to talk inflation um it's top of mind for lots of folks and especially food inflation 25% of all grocery spending happens at a Walmart in this country so talk to me about these stubbornly high prices and their impact on the Walmart Shopper how have you seen their shopping habits change yeah we've been talking about the last couple years all the things we're trying to do to keep prices down or to slow inflation and you know happy to report right now that prices across our portfolio are about the same as last year um and I haven't been able to say that for a few years we have 6,000 items and for us is a lot that are on what we call rollback where we have price reductions and big categories like general merchandise we're seeing deflation so I'm I'm feeling much better about inflation in terms of pricing versus a year ago but we're not finished you know our team talks about all the time what's the lowest that we can try to sell items for and what other things can we do we have items like our our 2 L private brand soft drinks that are now a dollar um that are going really well um we've gotten French bread back to a dollar loaf that rose up to over a140 during the pandemic and those are big percent drops you know a few cents here and there but it adds up in a basket I know you've got over 100 stores going to be opening up in the next few years how are you thinking about self checkout what's the future of that at Walmart yeah we're thinking about it in in a number of ways what you know what we want is great customer service and we would love for a customer to be able to go check out when they're ready and choose the way that they're going to do it um however we want to make sure that the checkout process is accurate retail shrinkage is a cost so enabling us to lower that cost we can keep prices down and that's really what we're focused on so self checkouts not going away at Walmart there are a few stores where we've made the decision that that they'll come out of but we haven't made that decision in every store to come back to the point of inflation you seem pretty optimistic that things are moving in the right direction I'm feeling much better um I mean there are so many opinions two to three years ago on what would happen whether it was going to be permanent or transitory or food only and and the answer is what I've learned over 30 years is it's just really hard to tell we want to be there for everybody we serve the whole country so we try to do the best we can to keep prices low in all categories and keep our quality in a place that's inspiring to our consumers so we can serve hear what he had to say about inflation great interview there but we know Walmart has really been pushing to hire employees for these higher paying jobs without college degrees and they influence so much in the economy and other companies are they influencing other companies to do the same well they're holding their first ever opportunity Summit here in DC today where more than a dozen big companies are coming together McDonald's Home Depot PepsiCo Verizon they're looking for ways to offer more of these sixf fig jobs to more people folks who don't necessarily have a college degree and you heard him talk about training workers to have the right skills to see a career path with within the company to see growth within the company I think John ferer himself is a good example he started out stocking shelves at a Walmart back in the 1990s now he's CEO of their us operations wow that is amaz there isn't it absolutely Alexis thank you so much for that

Channel: Good Morning America

Views: 48,467

Keywords: abc, alexis, ceo, christoforous, gma, inflation, news, p_cmsid=2494279, p_vid=news-109580027, president, prices, process, self-checkout, walmart

Id: sPGAKJcV0Q4

Length: 4min 38sec (278 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2024