Sarah Nassauer

And it also had a reputation as a seller of cheap stuff.

And so he had to like get the basics of the business heading in a better direction.

For him and executives at the time, the idea was we have to make our stores, like the thing that we have and we make most of our money and profit on, U.S.

stores, super centers, we have to make them better.

So our workers have to be happier.

They have to stick around a little longer.

We have to actually invest in the stores.

And if we can get the store operating better, then we can do this online stuff.

So he and the company's board decided to invest in worker pay.

And there was an announcement just before I started on the beat about, you know, they were going to go up to a minimum of $9 an hour, right, back in 2015.

And eventually they would get up to $14, which is where they are today.

I remember back in 2016, Warren Buffett started to sell his Walmart stock, and I think got out of Walmart by 2018, around there, and got a lot of attention at the time, right?

And at the time, you know, Walmart sales were a little less even, and you were just at the beginning of all of these strategy changes.

Have you talked to him since recently?

Have you gloated to him a little bit?

That was 2016, the Jet.com acquisition.

It was $3.3 billion that they spent, and they put the founder of that company, Mark Lurie, at the head of their US e-commerce operations and brought in a bunch of folks who were Jet employees as executives to run their e-commerce operations.

While Jet itself did not survive in any way, and I think there's a lot of debate about whether or not it made sense to make that acquisition, it's clear that it changed the culture internally.

It made it clear that this was a priority.

And you did start to see their e-commerce sales grow pretty quickly.