David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's the customer centricity. They're both deeply customer-centric. Bezos sort of adopted the centric part of customers centricity, or at least, that is the way that he refers to it. But Sam Walton, in about eight different ways in his book, tells you that the only thing that makes Walmart tick is listening to the customer. It just so happens that the vector that they optimized for more than anything else was price and Amazon was convenience. I think it might be worth a minute to discuss process power. Do we think Walmart has process power? There are two areas I'm thinking about with this. One is the operations themselves and everything we've talked about. I don't think you could airlift that out of Walmart and put it somewhere else. You could argue that it's outgrowth of scale economies that they have it. But I'm also wondering, there's this DNA at Walmart, or at least there used to be under Sam, of what you just said, the lowest price is the thing that matters the most. They could have, and I think most other companies would have taken their distribution and operation advantages and increased their profit margins. That is like anathema at Walmart. It's always like, we will keep the lowest prices possible for our consumers. We will take the absolute bare minimum margin possible, pass it all along to consumers rather than taking it for the company. The question is, is that still true, or are they looking for opportunities to keep margin now given growth has stalled?…

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