Quick Take — US: new products, smaller packages and offers to attract inflation-weary customers

From Clorox to Kraft Heinz, US companies are finally realising that half of American consumers cannot afford what they are selling.

To appeal to cash-strapped, inflation-weary shoppers, companies are launching smaller, cheaper products, launching value packages and, in some cases, reversing price increases.

Coca-Cola is selling soft drinks in ‘skinnier’ and cheaper bottles. Target has new offerings in its toy department for $5. ..

McDonald’s has already reported the difficulties of its franchisees….

Walmart executives – after sounding the alarm about petrol – said last week they had lowered the price on 7,200 items and planned to use the company’s tariff refund (on duties) to fund further price cuts.

The retailer also indicated a promotion in which it offers hamburgers, hot dogs, sandwiches and all other essentials for a meal that feeds eight people for less than $5 per person.

The Wall Street Journal

Quick Take — How Walmart is taking over empty pharmacies to speed up deliveries

The US retail giant builds last-mile warehouses in repurposed spaces to counter Amazon’s advance in the food sector.

Walmart has long argued that its 4,600 shops in the US represent a competitive advantage in e-commerce due to their proximity to customers’ homes, enabling delivery in less than three hours to 95% of the country. But picking groceries and merchandise inside a 180,000-square-foot Walmart Supercenter is time-consuming, and online order pickers in the aisles can get in the way of regular customers, who are more profitable. Walmart Depots are not open to the public. They are satellite shops of about 20,000 square feet (about 1,860 square metres) accessible only to on-call workers who use the Spark app for deliveries, to pick up orders and deliver them to customers.

The depots only stock popular household items and are supervised by the managers of neighbouring Supercenters. They have no sign outside and, from the description, resemble the dark stores of quick commerce.

Below: a dark store in Milan

Quick Take — Sam’s Club (Walmart): ‘At Sam’s Club we do not consider e-commerce as a separate channel’

It is a division of the Walmart Group, which had a turnover of $92.6 billion in 2024 “Sam’s” is named after its founder, Sam Walton.

E-commerce is growing by 23% (and for Walmart it weighs $150 billion) and as we see from this excerpt, the giant now delivers (ready-to-eat) food, competing with DoorDash, UberEats etc.: …almost two-thirds of Sam’s e-commerce business is now handled directly by shops, which, as [Greg ] Pulsifer (senior VP of Sam’s) acknowledges, is “the textbook definition of an omnichannel company”.

About 70 per cent of the retailer’s members also sign up online… Last month, Sam’s Club launched its Express delivery service, which promises delivery of orders within an hour

Another noteworthy innovation in e-commerce is Sam’s Club’s entry into the pizza delivery business, which began exactly one year ago. “I think the interesting thing is that the history of pizza started with roast chicken,” Pulsifer reflects. “Roast chicken was one of the most popular products for in-store pick-up and we wanted to find a way to make it available for home delivery as well, which was a challenging problem to solve.” Sam’s Club now delivers more than 22,000 pizzas per week and uses artificial intelligence to predict the busiest days for deliveries to anticipate customer demand…

Progressive Grocer

Quick Take — Why millennials are the most valuable audience for retail TV networks: a US study

According to a new study published by The People Platform , a Stagwell company, millennial consumers between the ages of 35 and 44 are the most likely to use digital coupons and the most frequent adopters of self-checkout technology, thus representing a more valuable audience for food media networks than consumers in other age groups…

These networks are common practice in the US (Walmart even has a TV), in Italy Selex recently announced this type of initiative at the ecommerce food conference.

(Selex was Esselunga ‘s partner in the ESD Italia purchasing centre, which I had founded with accountant Riccardo Francioni).

Quick Take — Walmart reports 5.4 per cent profit growth in its annual report, driven by e-commerce.

Walmart reported revenue growth of 5.1 per cent in constant currency and earnings growth of 5.4 per cent on an adjusted basis, driven by 24 per cent global growth in e-commerce, the company reported in its corporate results for fiscal year 2026. The retailer released its Annual Report 2026 on 23 April, ahead of its Annual General Meeting of Shareholders in June.

According to the report, Walmart posted a 4.7 per cent increase in revenue in fiscal year 2026, while membership fee revenue grew by 15.5 per cent. The retailer achieved online sales of $150.4 billion during the year..

Progressive Grocer