As it turns out, Walmart is facing challenges bigger than anyone thought. A second round of store closings was just announced, and the company is saying that half of its stores in one major U.S. city will be permanently shut down because they are losing tens of millions of dollars every year. Many locations are underperforming right now as shoppers complain about double-digit price increases at Walmart and turn to other retailers for “greater” value. The big-box retail chain is also in a complicated financial condition, missing investors’ earnings expectations and reporting growing cash flow problems. The situation has become so alarming that one industry CEO is warning about a flood of bankruptcies in the sector in 2023 as America’s biggest retailers cope with an increasing amount of distress.
Shoppers are noticing that prices at the big-box retailer have continued to rise in 2023 despite inflation numbers cooling down. For several quarters now, Walmart is losing sales and losing shoppers. As previously reported by GOBankingRates, a study from the value investing site ValueWalk found that Walmart grocery prices climbed by 21.5% over the past 12 months.
According to Walmart CFO John David Rainey, shoppers will have to prepare themselves for another year of price increases. In an interview with Reuters, the executive said the world’s biggest retailer might still have to raise prices to deal with higher costs. “We’re assuming that this year is going to be somewhat anomalous… [We’re] still feeling the effects of higher prices,” Rainey said.
However, this may further squeeze the company’s bottom line as more and more customers turn to discount stores. The outlook for Walmart in 2023 has suffered a drastic shift. In January, executives seemed to believe in the retailer’s ability to recoup its 2022 losses and report strong sales growth this year. But those views were shaken, and this week, the big-box store chain just announced another round of closings, citing poor financial performance at several locations.
The stores affected this time are located in DC, Georgia, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. The retailer confirmed it will lay off thousands of store employees and hundreds of hundreds of workers at five fulfillment centers across the US.
More worryingly, Walmart is permanently shuttering half of its stores in the city of Chicago. “The simplest explanation is that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago – these stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years,” it revealed.
Walmart’s troubles should alarm everyone in the industry. According to CNBC, due to its massive size and substantial market share, Walmart is considered a barometer for the nation’s economy as a whole. So any trends we’re seeing in Walmart will likely be reflected in your local grocery store as well.
Everything is falling apart faster than anyone predicted, and even the biggest chains are struggling to survive in such a difficult environment. If the biggest retailer in the world is coping with this many challenges, smaller companies will likely experience even more serious problems this year. The retail apocalypse spares no one, and the next chapters of this crisis will chill many people to the core.
Article cross-posted from The Epic Economist.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Does this have anything to do with the huge increase in shoplifting we see everywhere now. It’s especially bad in bit cities and nobody does anything about it. Or is something else hurting Walmart more? Would have been nice if the article had addressed this obvious question.
The biggest problem for Walmart is they own all their own stores outright, and lying about why the closures is not helping the value of these buildings.
How do you know so much? When I retired I worked briefly at a WM store and their losses thru theft the first year open was approaching 500k. All white area.
Why will you not mention the city that had the losses me thinks you are fibbing.
If I said I worked briefly for 5 Walmarts and they all had huge losses. all bl-ack areas, but I cannot mention which cities. My post would be meaningless.
Wokeism is fatal.
And these corporations usually support Democrates who have caused this mess. Somebody’s getting paid off big time.
woke management gets paid, stock holders will take it up their a . .ss
Walmart’s problem, and the nation’s problem, is Joe Xiden. 81 million votes…sure.
You are right about that. And didn’t they say something like inflation slowed down? Where? I still can’t find items due to supply chain issues. Gas prices have gone up again. This will not stop until we get the real President back in.
Trump 2024 for a third win ( if we survive that long).
Your right this is a ll the fault of Biden and the Democrats. They have totally destroyed the economy. Trump had it running great and then Biden was installed as president and screwed it up in less then two years. And that is a fact.
When you allow the privileged class to rob your stores, the easy way to recover financially is to raise prices for the law keepers. That will work as well as punishing people with good credit on mortgages.
In law-abiding communities, WalMart is doing just fine, Thank You.
Walmarts where I live have no checkers, and not even any bags to put your stuff in. Even when they had checkers, they were few and the lines were long. There are just no reasons to choose Walmart over another store. Walmart is just gross 🤢.
The stores are filthy
The odors are horrendous
They stock during peak shopping hours
They never have enough check out lanes open
They’re “woke”
I agree, my local Walmart apparently dropped their employee dress code months age and now there are purple haired, nose ring and tattooed employees all over the store. Wokeness is promoted by Walmart owners…..so they deserve the result….
The USA would be a better place if Wal*Mart never existed in the first place. If they fail now maybe mom & pop stores by the hundreds of thousands would return all across the land. That would be a great thing.
Maybe walmart should get their heads out of their azses.
But, but.. how can this be? President Biden says, “things are better than ever!”
I’ve been de-facto boycotting Walmart for years.
Their clothing has continually declined in quality. As a tall woman, I need longer sleeves, shirt tails and pants’ lengths. As a mature, active woman, I need pants that start at my waist and provide room in the seat. Basically, I need a dignified and comfortable fit. I also need materials which are thick enough to keep me warm in the winter, and of a quality that will stand up to the washing machine and dryer. Since about the year 2000, the quality of clothes from Walmart has declined every year. Now nothing they offer fits, nor will it last more than about 4 months – tops.
They have continued to treat their employees worse and worse. I find that hard to support. They still have good values in their grocery department and soap. They also have the best variety. Nonetheless, I’ve found myself willing to shop in several other stores, rather than make that one big run to Walmart. It’s a matter of ethics. How can I support a company that treats people so poorly?
So they’re on their way out. OK. I think it would be better for my community if we had several retailers competing for our dollars, rather than Walmart crushing everyone else. I’m ready to see them go, and see if we can get something better in Walmart’s absence.
Clothes that fit and stand the test of time would be nice. Employees who have greater stability and better working conditions would be good too.
Walmart and all big conglomerates need to collapse. They are more dangerous to America’s well being than any foreign adversary. America can’t survive with corporations size of small countries.
regards to what really, truely happening at walmart, the idiot media won’t talk about… it is the HUGE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM… BUT that is the thing will kill walmart….
The biggest thing I have with Walmart shipping is to slow. Amazon has them beat big time there. Amazon has done a great job with shipping.
Wokemart can now reap the backlash of plandememic gestapo.