What It Does: Walmart owns and manages drugstores, clothing stores, hypermarkets, cash-and-carry stores, supermarkets, specialty electronics, home improvement stores, and convenience stores.
Mission: Walmart’s mission statement is to build a better world by helping people to improve their living standards while setting up thriving and sustainable communities.
Size and Presence: Walmart has a workforce of over 90,000 employees in Canada across more than 400 retail stores. Roughly 37% of these stores are in Ontario.
Best Known For: Last year, Fortune Global 500 named Walmart as the largest company in the world by revenue. Walmart is best known as the largest private employer globally. It’s one of the most popular retail store chains in the world.
The Good Bits: Walmart has promising career advancement opportunities for its entry-level employees and interns. There's job security. The company offers some of the best employment incentives and perks, which is indicative of excellent welfare.
The Not-So-Good Bits: The work is very demanding, which can cause employee burnout. The company has a very strict absence policy which its employees frequently complain about.
In 1945, Sam Walton purchased a branch of the Ben Franklin store. After its lease expired, he opened a new store in Bentonville. He named this store Walton's Five and Dime. Walton's business model was to sell goods at a low price to generate a high sales volume. This involved him getting low-cost suppliers. In mid-1962, Walton opened the first Wal-Mart store in Arkansas. Within five years in Arkansas, Wal-Mart had grown to a chain of 18 retail stores. In early 1994, Walmart gained a presence in Canada by purchasing 122 Woolco leases. The company revamped the appearance of these stores and displayed its banner on each of them.
After the acquisition, Walmart retained Woolco’s former workforce, retrained them, and increased their salaries. In 2005, the company had grown to 260 stores, and in 2006, Walmart established supercenters in Canada. In 2015, the company announced its intention to purchase 13 former Target stores. In late 2018, Walmart struck up a partnership with Instacart and commenced offering same-day delivery service. Three years later, Walmart Canada made an announcement that it would close six stores and renovate the majority of its stores within the next five years.
Walmart's culture is based on four core values defining its code of conduct. These values include Acts of Integrity, Respect for the Individual, Service to the Customer, and Striving for Excellence. The first value talks about the fairness the company exhibits in its business dealings with customers and the way it treats and values its employees. The second value is about the culture of respect within the organization, and the employees are on cordial terms with each other. The third and fourth value reflects the customer-centricity of the firm. Walmart is a hub of diversity and inclusion, embodying employees from different walks of life.
Over the years, Walmart has proved itself as an ideal employer for bright and enterprising young talents. Its internship program lasts for ten weeks, and it offers its participants real work opportunities through which they can make an impact. Through this internship program, the interns also get to network with and get mentored by industry leaders. This internship program comes with several juicy perks as well as extra-curricular activities, which give its participants a chance to bond and connect outside the working environment.
The company's hiring process includes an application review, a series of interviews, a background check, a pre-employment drug screening, and a job offer.
An entry-level employee working at Walmart will earn an average of CA$ 30,000 yearly.
Walmart's incentives include medical coverage/insurance, virtual healthcare programs, tuition reimbursement, life insurance, paid parental leave, etc.
For almost three decades, Walmart has raised and disbursed more than C$684 million to several charity organizations in Canada.
Walmart has been frequently criticized for using lower prices to force rival businesses out of the picture.