FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) – Wal-Mart’s sway with customers and efforts by the world’s largest retailer to grow more nimble in a fast-changing consumer environment will take center stage during its annual shareholders’ meeting Friday.
Wal-Mart finds itself at a crossroads. Its long-held dominance in pricing has been chipped away both by Amazon.com and by dollar stores. But it’s fighting back on multiple fronts, growing more aggressive with its prices and it’s going after Amazon, both online and on the doorstep, by expanding delivery services.
At the same time its spending money on its stores and its staff. It’s now in the second year of a $2.7 billion investment in workers through training and higher wages, all with the hope of making Wal-Mart a place where people want to be.
Changes have been painful at times. It announced this year that it would shutter 269 stores worldwide, about half of them in the U.S. While only a tiny fraction of its locations worldwide, it was a rare pruning for Wal-Mart, particularly on its home turf.
Yet those maneuvers appear to have begun to pay off.