BENTONVILLE (TB&P) — Through the first three lists of products to be impacted by tariffs in the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China, Steve Bratspies, chief merchandising officer at Walmart, said the impact has been manageable with little impact to customers.
Bratspies, speaking at Barclays Global Consumer Staples Conference in Boston on Wednesday (Sept. 4), said the fourth list goes deeper and it will be tougher to keep prices stable.
Bratspies told investors the retail giant is in the process of going through the list line by line, looking for possible ways to mitigate the impact. Walmart is the largest retail importer of goods into the U.S.
“I was really proud of how the team handled lists 1 through 3. And there were a few prices that we did have to change (increase) but we didn’t see any change in our unit projection of where we thought it would be. So, that was absorbed. But we were very focused and targeted on how we did it. We didn’t let any of our price gaps slip. And we maintained price leadership in all of the things that we did, so we ran our model inside that well,” Bratspies said Wednesday.
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