Charlie Rose Talks to Wal-Mart Stores CEO Doug McMillon

Wal-Mart’s CEO discusses worker pay, the impact of digital shopping, and his respect for Jeff Bezos

Provide news feedback or report an error

Confidential tip?

Send a tip to our reporters

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

By Charlie Peete Rose

December 12, 2014 at 1:18 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the December 15, 2014 issue of businessweek.

What did we learn this Black Friday about the way retail and e-commerce are changing?
Our stores were really cranking during Thursday and Friday. On the Thursday we had over 22 million visitors. Over the weekend, people downloaded our Black Friday ad 25 million times. We’re seeing the customer engage with us in stores and online and increasingly on their mobile devices in new ways. Mobile surprised even me. Over the Black Friday weekend, 70 percent of the orders we received digitally came through a mobile device.

You’ve mentioned people ordering online and picking up at the store. Explain the psychology at work there.
People are moving around, and they don’t want to sit at home and wait. In the U.K., our team’s been adding a pickup capability in the parking lot, drive-throughs, and sometimes even taking a truck and parking it at a tube station so they can meet people on their way home from work. We opened a store in northwest Arkansas a few months ago that you can’t go into and shop. It’s just a pickup point. So you order on your mobile device or our website, and you schedule a time slot. Guess who loves it: Mom loves it.