Walmart continues to gird itself for the battle against Amazon

All your shopping is belong to us.
 By 
Marcus Gilmer
 on 
Walmart continues to gird itself for the battle against Amazon
Walmart is trying to best Amazon as your one-stop shop for everything Credit: AP/REX/Shutterstock

As Amazon's plan for world domination has swallowed Whole Foods, competing supermegachain Walmart is rolling out more plans to fight back in an ongoing battle of David Goliath versus Goliath.

The latest examples of Walmart's plan to keep up with Amazon? Personal shoppers and a cashier-less store, according to Recode.

The personal shopping project is part of Walmart's Code Eight subsidiary, which seems to be focusing on higher-end city shoppers, not necessarily Walmart's core demographic. The cashier-less store move is being spearheaded by Walmart's incubator Store No. 8, which is aiming for a business without no checkout lines.

Hope you know how to bag your own groceries.

Recode also reports that while the cashier-less stores are currently free for testers, Walmart plans to charge a membership fee down the line (is Walmart Prime too on-the-nose?).

With this, Walmart is certainly positioning itself to take on Amazon Go, the online retail behemoth's planned grocery store plan that was announced a year ago but hasn't made its way to the real world yet.

Since the announcement of Amazon Go and Jeff Bezos' Whole Foods buy, Walmart (and other similar stores) have been playing catch up, trying to position themselves to maintain a share in the market.

Here are a few of the other ways The House That Sam Walton Built has been trying to keep pace.

All in all, there's a lot going on here, which proves Walmart is not just nervous about Amazon's world domination efforts — but also about being left behind in the growing world of e-commerce and convenience.

Whether Walmart is successful not remains to be seen but this will, inevitably, lead to something even bigger and more absurd, like one of the companies buying Sears and then the other buying Target and then one buying the other and it all ends with Disney owning everything.

I, for one, will welcome our new mouse-eared grocery overlords.

Topics Amazon

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Marcus Gilmer

Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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