- Tension: Walmart’s identity as a bricks‑and‑mortar titan clashes with the agile expectations of today’s online shopper.
- Noise: Job cuts, flashy tech investments, and quarterly growth headlines disguise the deeper challenge: creating a retail model that truly feels seamless.
- Direct Message: Is Walmart redesigning retail to serve customer needs—or to protect legacy systems under the guise of innovation?
Read more about our approach → The Direct Message methodology.
The hum of warehouses. The click of shopping carts. The silent scroll of online storefronts.
At the center of it all stands Walmart, a retail colossus recalibrating its identity for 2025.
Gone are the days when Walmart meant only sprawling stores. Now it means Global.com — a unit designed to link the physical and virtual, wherever the customer might be.
In early 2010, Walmart rolled out Global.com under Wan Ling Martello, its then-EVP & COO of Global e-commerce.
Fast forward fifteen years: the banner still flies, but under intensifying strain—and opportunity. Walmart’s recent memo detailed over 1,500 job cuts across technology, e-commerce fulfillment, and advertising teams—moves meant “to sharpen our focus” on a future of global e-commerce growth.
It’s a paradox: invest in e-commerce momentum—even as you prune the teams meant to deliver it. Global e-commerce sales rose 16% in Q4 2025 compared to last year, with penetration rising across grocery, marketplace, and advertising channels . So why the disconnect between growth and downsizing?
The tension is at the heart of Walmart’s transformation—or impasse. One path demands aggressive modernization, leaner operations, and agile technology.
The other asks: how do you preserve the scale and structure of a retail empire built in a different era?
Narrative: The warehouse and the website
Imagine two Walmart employees in 2025.
The first works in a high-speed e-commerce fulfillment center, orchestrating packages with robotics and AI.
The second stock shelves in a suburban supercenter built decades ago. The first feels pressure—“stay ahead of Amazon,” “cut costs,” “shake things up.” The second wonders: “Won’t the physical store become a showpiece, a showroom for the online shop?”
In press communications, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon celebrated growth, saying the company “will stay focused on growth, improving operating margins, and strengthening ROI as we invest to serve our customers and members even better.
Yet the internal memo to those 1,500 associates described a simultaneous shedding of roles—then hints at adding new ones aligned with business priorities.
This narrative threading weaves two contradictory stories: one of investment and expansion, another of streamlining and cutbacks.
Both are true.
And both beg the question: which Walmart emerges when the offline world and its digital reflection are still negotiating their terms?
Status anxiety: saving legacy while chasing agility
Walmart’s leadership understands the optics. A slowdown in online orders or customer sentiment could invite criticism:
“Walmart is asleep at the wheel.”
But cutting roles in e-commerce fulfillment and advertising triggers another worry: “Walmart is scaling back.”
These dual anxieties shape public strategy. GSI Commerce’s EVP Fiona Dias welcomed Walmart’s e-commerce embrace as “good news for everyone”
.Yet she warned that integrating online and offline channels “could stifle the growth potential,” given that the vast majority of Walmart’s business remains store-based.
The dynamic is status‑driven: Walmart must show it’s not falling behind Amazon, while also preserving the value of its legacy infrastructure. That creates tension. Will it go all-in on digital, or reassert the supremacy of in-store presence?
Cutting complexity, or cutting corners?
The memo from tech leadership emphasized simplifying the Global Tech, Walmart U.S., and Connect organizations to “remove layers and complexity.”
In HR terms, cutting complexity can be an opportunity: streamline redundant roles, focus on scalable solutions, and realign talent.
But wisdom warns that speed without context can fracture relationships — with customers and employees.
If teams’ warehousing and advertising are severed, what happens to the synchronized storytelling between Walmart.com and Connect? How will the online ad offerings grow if staff are slashed?
Walmart’s Global.com framework, built to unite physical and digital, now needs a living network — not just a tech stack. Cutting roles risks unraveling that cohesion when it’s most needed.
The direct message
What if true e-commerce transformation means more than digital growth—it means rethinking relationships across every customer touchpoint?
This question reframes the narrative.
Growth without cohesion, investment without integration—both strategies fail when you treat channels as lines in a spreadsheet rather than stories in a customer’s experience.
Streamlining cannot mean severing the fiber that connects the warehouse to the website, checkout to curbside pick-up.
What’s next for Walmart
The Q4 2025 e-commerce growth—16 percent globally — is encouraging.
However, job cuts remind us that transformation is costly. Walmart is choosing to double down on speed and simplicity — from internal tech roles to more agile fulfillment operations.
One hope lies in modular hiring: shedding corporate layers while recruiting frontline experts in customer experience, data science, or last-mile logistics. Walmart may well reemerge leaner and more adaptive. The question is: adaptive to which model?
Will Walmart use adversity as a crucible to craft a genuinely hybrid retail experience? Or will it retreat behind legacy infrastructure, shielding its strengths but trading growth for control?
The deeper challenge: identity in retail’s new era
The real test isn’t whether Global.com can expand. It’s whether Walmart can evolve without fracturing its soul.
The Global Tech memo highlighted the goal: “enhancing associate, customer, and member experiences”.
That’s its North Star—but between ambition and reality lies complexity.
Customers don’t shop “e-commerce” and “in-store.” They breathe between both. Their desires shift: they want the immediacy of pickup and the depth of online choice. They want the convenience of digital scanning in aisles and the social friction that a physical trip brings.
Walmart’s power lies in its scale.
Its opportunity: to feel smaller, friendlier, more connected. Its risk: to feel hollow, transactional, or chaotic if the architecture doesn’t hold.
A narrative in progress
Walmart is rewriting its retail story. Global.com is the chapter where corridors meet clouds. But every rewrite risks severing plot threads—those human stories of customer care, fulfillment heroes, and neighborhood stores.
The job cuts are subplots. The e-commerce growth is a rising action.
The unifying theme?
Whether Walmart will choose to be a retailer that sells in every channel—or a retailer that knows every channel.
In retail’s next act, how will Walmart choose to define itself—by preserving control, or by deepening connections?
