Zaid

And honestly, things were not looking great for them.

At the time, Amazon was absolutely torching the retail industry.

Online shopping was exploding and Walmart, which had spent decades dominating the giant physical stores, suddenly looked like a dinosaur.

They had very little e-commerce presence at the time and their same store sales were declining.

That's when Walmart's board made a bet on a guy named Doug McMillan.

He took over as CEO in February of 2014.

Now, McMillan is a Walmart lifer.

He started working at Walmart as a teenager in the 1980s, unloading trucks at an Arkansas warehouse.

And he literally worked his way up from the warehouse floor to becoming the CEO of the company.

And when he took over, he focused on modernizing Walmart.

He doubled down on e-commerce by acquiring a company called Jet.com for $3 billion in 2016.

A lot of people at the time thought that was an overpay, and while Jet.com didn't really work out, it brought e-commerce talent into Walmart.

Jet.com founder Mark Lurie ran Walmart's e-commerce business and turned it into a fast-growing business that it is today.

But beyond the Jet.com acquisition, CEO Doug McMillan also invested billions of dollars in making Walmart's supply chain automated and tech-driven.

He also launched Walmart Plus, which was their answer to Amazon Prime, which is estimated to have over 25 million subscribers today.

but I think the best decision that he made was leveraging Walmart's physical stores.

A fun fact, 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart.

So Doug McMillan spent billions of dollars to transform those 5,000 plus stores in the US into hyper-efficient distribution hubs to fulfill online orders.

And by doing that, that allowed Walmart to deliver orders within hours, not days, including groceries.

Walmart's footprint became a competitive advantage compared to Amazon, which lacked physical