Looks like Walmart is leveraging the new talent in their leadership fold, Marc Lore formerly of Jet.com and diapers.com, to launch a skunk works in Silicon Valley dubbed Store #8 after the store Company founder Sam Walton used to try out new retail strategies.
Feels like less of a moonshot factory then say how Bell Labs, Xerox's PARC, Amazon's Lab126 or Google's X were set-up. But then one can ask how many of those great inventions did AT&T or Xerox actually leverage (the stuff Apple ended up launching don't count!) versus languishing on shelves. And exactly how many of X's moonshots have been commercialized? Maybe, if Store #8 is less rabbit and more turtle in the race to capture Consumers wallets. And in that scenario, Walmart can point to a whole list of competitors it has slowly but surely ground into dust.
http://www.chainstoreage.com/article/walmart-launches-store-no---its-not-really-store?tp=i-H55-Q5S-341-4rp50-1u-14Qs-1c-iuA-4rjD4-27Eehq&utm_campaign=Daily&utm_source=Experian&utm_medium=email&cid=11781&mid=71933082
Is this the end of eCommerce and the revival of brick & mortar? With Alibaba’s $2.88 billion purchase of a stake in a top Walmart competitor in the Chinese market one would not be faulted for answering that question affirmatively but this is probably moreso that latest stage of the Imperial Army slowly mowing down the last of the Rebels. Sure companies like Amazon and eBay are never going to forsake their digital platforms but they have wrecked enough carnage in the brick & mortar world to now have a wide enough birth to start becoming omni-channel players. What does this mean for the surviving brick & mortar companies? Be afraid. Be very afraid. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alibaba-spending-2-9-billion-111959145.html
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