Walmart+ Benefits

Phil: So Sally, tell me, Walmart+ is trying really hard over the past few weeks. We've seen lots of improvements. 

Sally: Yes, we have. They just keep adding more benefits to the Walmart+ membership, which I think is, you know, they're really reaching out and trying to get more people to sign up. And then this latest move, which I'm so curious to hear what you think about, this is an item specific rewards program it's called Walmart rewards. And if you are a member of Walmart+, and you buy one of these items, it will tell you how many points it's worth. And you can add that to your rewards. 

Phil: Yeah, it's, it's very similar to a program, there's a small supermarket, a single supermarket operator here in Santa Monica called Bob's market. And what they just instituted, I wanna say about a month ago is something similar. What you do is you punch in your cell phone number and it accumulates points, and then you can exchange those points for products. So for example, when I went shopping this weekend, it would allow me to redeem X amount of points for a free Newman's Own lemonade kind of thing. So it's interesting. What I wonder about though with this Walmart+ program, in order to redeem the rewards, when you're in store, you have to scan a QR code that's generated through the Walmart pay app at checkout, and then tap to use Walmart rewards. I'm just wondering if it's gonna be too cumbersome. 

Sally: I agree. Yeah. I noticed that too. And I was thinking about, okay, who is everyone tech savvy enough to take advantage of that in the store? 

Phil: Yeah. And the other thing in more intelligence, released the survey last week and they found that in 2020 shoppers used electronic coupons more often than ones in freestanding inserts, first time it ever happened. However, the footnote to that is really simple because there's less FSIS now since the pandemic that are out there because they take three months to calculate. And basically the brands don't know what's gonna be, you know, on the shelves in three months. So, I wanna say yes. I mean, I think that more people are using electronic coupons, but I'm not sure that it's fair to compare to FSIS.