In 2024, I was fortunate to join Walmart Connect, overseeing a $30M in-store media product portfolio. It was a career highlight—not just because of the scale, but because Walmart is one of the rare organizations where culture is not decorative. It’s operational.

Walmart’s culture traces directly back to Sam Walton, who understood something most leaders miss: motivation isn’t abstract. It’s behavioral. And behavior is shaped by systems.

That philosophy is distilled into three principles that still govern the company today:

• Treat employees well so they treat customers well
• Everyday low price—avoid unnecessary costs and pass savings on
• Everyday low cost—know your COGS and negotiate relentlessly

Simple ideas. Enforced consistently.

That consistency is the real advantage.

One of the most striking aspects of Walmart is how deliberately it reinforces its values.

There’s the Walmart cheer—a chant performed at town halls. It’s easy to underestimate rituals like this until you see them in action. Apparently inspired by a chant Sam Walton observed at a factory in China, it functions exactly as rituals always have: synchronizing people, reinforcing belonging, and aligning energy.

Songs and chants may feel quaint in modern corporate culture, but they’re powerful tools. They collapse distance between individuals and remind everyone they’re part of something larger than their role.

At Walmart, belief isn’t assumed.

It’s practiced.

Walmart often describes its approach as avoiding merchandising gimmicks—and at a strategic level, that’s true. The philosophy is that frequent reconfiguration creates unnecessary cost, and unnecessary cost eventually shows up in prices.

But what’s fascinating is how deeply intentional the store design actually is.

Action Alley forms a continuous corridor around departments, creating natural movement patterns. Pallet drops and rollbacks are positioned where traffic is densest. Apparel—high-margin and impulse-driven—sits centrally. The perimeter houses essentials: grocery, pharmacy, electronics, white goods.

Nothing is accidental.

The store itself is a system.

There’s a reason Walmart stores feel familiar wherever you go. Familiarity reduces friction. Reduced friction increases throughput. This is retail psychology applied at planetary scale.

It’s also hard not to notice how this industrial, no-frills efficiency influenced broader retail aesthetics. The lineage from Walmart’s utilitarian design to Costco’s warehouse minimalism feels less like coincidence and more like convergence around the same cost logic.

From a management perspective, Walmart is endlessly fascinating.

It’s a global organization anchored in the U.S., coordinating vast, distributed teams across commerce, logistics, technology, and media. The level of intelligence and specialization required to operate at this scale is staggering.

During my time there, I saw how carefully Walmart thinks about:

• Marketplace dynamics for third-party sellers
• Fulfillment networks and inventory flow
• Coordination between physical and digital retail

The complexity isn’t theoretical—it’s operational, and it’s relentless.

And yet, for all that complexity, Walmart retains a grounded core: food.

This is where Walmart’s strategic position becomes truly interesting, especially in relation to Amazon.

Walmart owns the pantry. People shop for food weekly. That rhythm creates habitual engagement and logistical gravity. Once you’re buying groceries regularly from a retailer, it becomes trivial to layer in additional purchases, which you might have made at Amazon.

This gives Walmart a structural advantage that’s difficult to replicate.

As the company invests in automation, agentic AI, and emerging fulfillment methods like drone delivery, the implications are profound. The potential to fold discretionary spending into habitual food orders—especially through subscriptions and auto-replenishment—reshapes how competition works.

This isn’t about reacting to e-commerce trends.

It’s about redefining the default.

My time at Walmart deepened my understanding of how culture, cost, and scale interlock. I learned that:

• Culture is not a poster—it’s a cost structure
• Rituals matter when they reinforce behavior
• Store layouts are economic arguments
• Owning frequency beats owning novelty
• Scale rewards clarity, not cleverness

Walmart is often discussed in extremes. Inside, what I saw was something more nuanced: a disciplined organization with a clear worldview, executing against it with remarkable consistency.

I’m grateful for the experience, the people I worked with, and the systems I was able to observe from the inside.

It made me a better systems designer.