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Q&A: Walmart leader chats about Florida stores, and the chain's latest retail strategy

 
Walmart director of corporate communications Phillip Keene poses for a photo during a recent visit to St. Petersburg.  [SARA DINATALE | Times]
Walmart director of corporate communications Phillip Keene poses for a photo during a recent visit to St. Petersburg. [SARA DINATALE | Times]
Published April 20, 2018

The Tampa Bay Times recently sat down with Walmart director of corporate communications Phillip Keene to chat about the retail giant's latest retail strategies and how the company is winning over customers in a competitive market.

Already, two of the dozen Tampa Bay area Walmart stores slated for remodels by the end of this year have been completed. A handful of local stores have the chain's' new "Pickup Towers," which are similar to Amazon lockers but even more high-tech. "Walmart.com" just had a recent makeover and more metro areas are being added to the chain's flat-rate grocery delivery option Tampa had already been testing out.

Keene, who oversees public affairs and company communications across 20 states in Northeast, Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, spoke about Walmart's mission to not only save people money, but time with its latest initiatives.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Can you take me through what shoppers will see in the updated stores around the Tampa Bay area?

A: The thing customers need to know about a remodeled store is if you walked into a store a day before it started and then walked in on grand-opening day, it's a completely different customer experience. So, this isn't about a little bit of paint on the wall, we're going to patch up the floors and put on a new coat of wax — it's a total customer transformation.

It's new signage, it's lower-profile counters, it's added assortment of specific brands that matter to Walmart moms, for example. It's cosmetics, baby (and) convenience options that are folded in — in terms of us being able to add on things like express deli pick-up, fresh pick-up and cooler counters in the front.

When you walk in to entertainment, it looks like you are in some modern Apple Store. It's awesome. It's black and white. All of the tablets, phones and laptops are accessible. You can put your hands on them and test them out.

It's a greatly enhanced, sleek tangible shopping experience.

Read more: Walmart to remodel 12 Tampa Bay stores, add more pickup towers

Q: What moved Walmart to increase the number of Pickup Towers throughout Florida and the country and how have shoppers been responding?
A: The Pickup Towers are cool, first of all. They're 16-feet tall, storage-container-vending-machine-robot-looking things. It's a presence.

One of the strategies around that is to say, how do we decrease wait times and how do we increase convenience for customers who want to order (on Walmart.com) to come pick up that item at a store? How do we make that as frictionless as possible? That's what the towers are for.

Someone brings in their phone, their QR code (a scannable quick response code) and there's arms in the tower that retrieve things… It will drop it in the tray and you can walk out with your item. Sometimes a minute, two minutes tops.

Folks have just loved it. At the end of the day, we do what we do for the customer and we listen to their needs… We're going to put several hundred more in stores this year.

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Q: Beyond the towers, how does Walmart view online shopping's relationship to its brick-and-mortar stores?

If I could sum up the philosophy you might be able to say it in a way that we're platform agnostic. We offer our low prices and our assortment on a variety of channels: It could be in the store, mobile phone, laptop, tablet, the app or the website… We're where customers are in terms of how they want to shop more than ever.

Being there is the starting point, and then, I think, bringing the value proposition we have always offered along with the convenience is where we have set ourselves apart.

We're trying to make decisions to let what we do best shine.

<a href="http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/retail/Grocery-wars-After-trial-in-Tampa-Walmart-begins-nationwide-grocery-delivery_166345088&#8217;>Read more:Walmart begins to roll out nationwide grocery delivery

Q: What has the feedback been like for the ongoing grocery delivery roll-out? What appears to be the main shopper demographic gravitating toward it?

A: Everybody likes delivery. It's folks who maybe aren't close to a store, people who maybe have difficulties getting out, maybe physical limited, older clients, seniors, busy moms who want to put in an order and know they will be home between 5 and 6 the next day.

There's no one set segment, which is why I think it's so popular and why we decided to roll it out to 100 more metros this year. The end-of-the-year goal, is to deliver to 40 percent of the country.

Tampa and Orlando were among the test markets for this — where we realized how well it was going and how much customers liked it — and decided to scale it across a bunch of metros.

Contact Sara DiNatale at sdinatale@tampabay.com. Follow @sara_dinatale.