Walmart leader reimagines the retail experience

HOUSTON — When Walmart’s Greg Foran took over as CEO of the discounter’s U.S. division four years ago, he found messy stores with lots of items that were frequently out of stock. The 57year-old New Zealand native dove in, making sure shelves were loaded with the most popular products and establishing controls to increase freshness in produce.

Foran’s obsession with the nitty-gritty details has helped lead to several years of straight quarterly sales gains for the U.S. division. But with Walmart facing competition from Amazon and other pressures, he’s also reimagining the shopping experience at Walmart’s 4,700 stores, transforming them into distribution hubs that can fill the fastgrowing online orders to reduce shipping costs and speed up deliveries. To do that, Walmart has been training its 1.5 million workers at its new academies while using automation to relieve them of menial tasks.

Scanning robots at a store in Houston as well as a cluster of others keep tabs of what’s on and not on the shelves and communicate that information to the automatic conveyor system that’s backed up to the truck bay. Workers with new apps on their hand-held devices manage routine tasks such as price changes on the spot, freeing them to serve shoppers.

Foran, who used to head Walmart’s China business, says he’s always looking to new technology that improves efficiency. Still he takes delight in old-school retail basics like watching shoppers open a carton of produce.

AP spoke with Foran during a