Family Feud, Katy Perry, and a drone: What it was like to attend the week-long spectacle around Walmart’s shareholders meeting

Richard Feloni

More than 14,000 people from around the world attended this year’s meeting.

There is nothing else in the corporate world like the Walmart Shareholders Meeting.

Friday, June 3, more than 14,000 Walmart employees, executives, and shareholders poured into the University of Arkansas Bud Walton Arena.

Updates on the past fiscal year’s performance as well as the company’s latest initiatives were interspersed with comedy from “The Late Late Show” host James Corden and musical performances that included Nick Jonas and Katy Perry. And this was all before noon.

Shareholders fly to northwest Arkansas for just this four-hour meeting, but most employees arrive earlier in the week and the media is given a full three-day schedule.

I arrived in Bentonville, where Walmart is based, on the Tuesday ahead of the meeting. Here’s what I saw during my four days immersed in the culture of the world’s biggest retailer.

Shortly after arriving in Bentonville, I took a trip to the town’s square for a tour of the Walmart Museum. Employees — or “associates,” as they’re called — were arriving on shuttles. Here are some from Canada.

Employees from each country gave a unique cheer in front of the museum and posed for photos. Team Mexico, the oldest international branch, had a great fiscal year to be proud of.

The museum is the renovated and expanded Walton’s Five & Dime, a store that opened in 1950, predating Walmart by 12 years. It was the first store Walmart founder Sam Walton established in Bentonville.

The museum lobby is a nostalgic throwback to Walton’s early years as a small-time merchant, and has old-time candies and toys for sale.

President George H.W. Bush presented Walton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on display in the museum, on March 17, 1992, for Walton’s contributions to the American economy. He received it a mere two weeks before his death. In his posthumous memoir, “Made in America,” Walton called the award ceremony “the greatest day of my life.”

After his death, Walton’s office was meticulously recreated in the museum. The painting of him and his hunting dogs hangs on a tilt, the way it did in its original location.

Associates coming through the museum that week were encouraged to place a sticker on their place of origin on a map near the exit. Each international store and every other American store (they alternate each year) chose a Shareholders Meeting representative on merit.

Despite the shrine to 1950s and ’60s small town America in the museum, downtown Bentonville features new hangouts that wouldn’t be out of place in a college town. And a mile outside the square is the beautiful Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, largely funded by Sam’s daughter Alice.

Farther out from the square is the Walmart Home Office, what the executives call their headquarters. You’d expect the world’s largest retailer to have a high rise, but Walmart HQ looks more like a public high school, in keeping with Sam Walton’s preferences.

We had an early start Wednesday, heading to the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville to attend the US Associates Meeting in the Bud Walton Arena. An associate sang the national anthem.

“Sam Walton was the ultimate item merchant,” Chief Merchandising Officer Steve Bratspies told the audience, encouraging them to focus on selling more Walmart exclusives like emoji pillows.

COO Judith McKenna commended exceptional employees with “Happy to Help” awards. She also revealed that Walmart’s old mascot Smiley was making a comeback in both advertising and employee awards.

Television personality Steve Harvey was the morning’s guest host, and entered to uproarious applause. He moderated a game of “Family Feud” between Walmart executives and employees (the executives won by a point, but everyone pretended it was a tie to avoid a riot, as Harvey put it).

The Associate Expo, a sort of corporate county fair, narrowly missed being rained out. Employees could play games, like a tricycle race.

They could also enjoy free snacks and hang out with mascots, like this waffle guy.

The Expo provided free Yarnell’s Ice Cream, a small Arkansas brand that Sam Walton used to both sell and eat plenty of.

Aside from the snacks, there was a petting zoo with some goats and a camel — but most people were drawn to its puppies.

We then headed to the first Walmart Academy, in Fayetteville. The company showcased two new initiatives intended to drive recruitment, retainment, and engagement: Pathways and the Academy itself.

All new entry-level employees will be enrolled in Pathways, a map of promotional opportunities and training programs, and all new managers will spend two weeks at the nearest Walmart Academy for a crash course in Walmart leadership. “We want [employees] to really think of retail as a career,” said VP of US Talent Development Michelle Knight.

That night I was the only American reporter to attend the concert, also held at the Bud Walton Arena. Daughtry opened, ending their set with a cover of Prince’s “Purple Rain.” None of the performers or celebrities who make appearances during the shareholders festivities are compensated, but their production companies all have strong distribution relationships with Walmart.

The headliner was 3 Doors Down, who lauded Walmart’s ability to sell albums, as well as its dedication to giving employment options to veterans. I don’t listen to either of the bands that performed that night, but the high production quality of the show made it entertaining.

Thursday was the day of tours, and our first stop was a 1.2-million-square-foot distribution center in Bentonville. A key reason why Walmart’s prices are remarkably low is because the company controls more of its distribution process than other retailers.

Walmart’s forklifts are powered by hydrogen fuel stations, which only need three minutes for a full charge.

Employees are stationed throughout the facility to ensure everything’s running smoothly.

The distribution center was truly massive.

Key to competing with rivals like Amazon will be staying on top of technologies that keep the distribution process as efficient as possible, like this new high speed barcode scanner. The tour ended with a look at a drone (we couldn’t photograph it) which can handle a warehouse-wide inventory check in a day, a job that takes a month when done manually — that technology will be at a “mature stage” in 6-9 months.

Another key to Walmart’s competitive advantage is its truck fleet, which is constantly being redeveloped to be as safe, comfortable, and fuel-efficient as possible.

We then headed to a Sam’s Club in Bentonville (Walmart owns the chain, named after its founder), which is being developed as a prototype for what the wholesaler will look like across the world by the end of the year.

There is an emphasis on high-end, fresh seafood, meats, and prepared foods — stuff you’d find at Whole Foods but at a cheaper price.

Sam’s Club CEO Rosalind Brewer said that her company is reinventing itself for a higher-income consumer. This is dramatically emphasized at the Bentonville location, where you can buy a $200,000 necklace.

Walmart US president and CEO Greg Foran led a tour of a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Fayetteville. The Neighborhood Markets are 24/7 supermarkets, which are also emphasizing fresh, affordable items.

There were common themes between the Neighborhood Market tour and the Supercenter (the model most affiliated with the brand) tour in Rogers that followed. One of these is the focus on stress-free pickup of online orders.

Walmart’s leadership was also eager to point out Walmart Pay, its proprietary answer to Apple Pay and Samsung Pay introduced at the end of last year.

Among all of Walmart’s entities is a renewed focus on private label products. We ended the day at the new Culinary & Innovation Center in Bentonville, where many of these private label products will be developed. Celebrity chef Robert Irvine, who has an upcoming line of food products at Walmart, stopped by to say hello and praise the company.

Friday was the big day. At 7:30 a.m. the Bud Walton Arena was already roaring.

“The Late Late Show” host James Corden was this year’s celebrity emcee. He was hilarious, and it was fun watching him fearlessly, but good-naturedly, roast Walmart’s leadership. (For chairman Greg Penner, husband of Walmart founder Sam Walton’s granddaughter Carrie Walton Penner: “He worked tirelessly — at marrying Rob Walton’s daughter.”)

Updates on Walmart’s annual performance were punctuated with musical performances, like this one from Nick Jonas.

There was a shadow lingering outside of Walmart’s bubble the entire week, from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UCFW) which supported protests of what it perceives as Walmart’s low wages and lack of opportunity. Its side had a moment in the meeting when employee Margaret Hooton argued during the section for shareholder proposals that she has yet to see positive changes at her store, and is still struggling to make ends meet.

Sam Walton’s children Jim, Alice, and Rob presented Sam’s Club SVP Cindy O’Connor with the Entrepreneur of the Year Award for her work in helping transform the company for a higher income, more tech-savvy consumer.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. CEO — the head of the entire company — Doug McMillon gave the keynote. He opened with the story of how Sam Walton built Walmart, using a paper book that had animations projected onto it. He proclaimed that Walmart was entering an entirely new chapter in its life, and that it would have ramifications across the industry. “We have the opportunity to reimagine retail again,” he said.

McMillon pointed to a $2.7 billion investment in wages and new training programs over the next two years for its 2.3 million employees. He picked out an Arkansas Supercenter employee named Dwight Blanton from the crowd as a model employee, and gave him a promotion to assistant manager.

The meeting was capped off with a surprise performance from Katy Perry, complete with light show and smoke machines. In his memoir, Walton said that the carnivalistic shareholders meetings evolved out of a desire to have fun with employees and give them a boost of motivation — and the annual spectacle only grew after his death in ’92. “We like to think that this kind of meeting brings us all closer together, and creates the feeling that we are a family committed to one common interest,” he wrote.

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