Motley Fool Money - Wal Mart Shows Other Retailers How It’s Done

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Second quarter earnings results have been littered with slumping sales and disappointing guidance. Wal Mart threw that narrative on its head when it said it was raising sales guidance for the rest of the year. What’s in Wal Mart’s secret sauce? Also, investing lessons from Meta’s AI strategic changes, a smorgasboard of market news, and stocks on our radar Tyler Crowe, Matt Frankel, and Jon Quast discuss: - Wal Mart’s increased sales guidance standing out from its peers - Meta’s hiring freeze - Chipotle drone delivery? - Cracker Barrel’s rebranding - SPACs are back? Companies discussed: WMT, TGT, META, CMG, CBRL, TRIP, TREX Host: Tyler Crowe Guests: Matt Frankel, Jon Quast Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Walmart does something few retailers have done this quarter, and meta changes its AI plan. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. My name's Tyler Crow. I'm joined by longtime fools, Matt Frankel and John Quast. We have a real interesting show today. We're going to talk about meta's kind of changing AI strategy, AI plan, and how they plan to spend and tackle that, as well as look at a lightning round. We'll call it a smattering of questions related to some interesting news.

stories around the world of investing that we found today. But we want to start off with our first segment, which is talking about Walmart's earnings. Now, Walmart reported second quarter earnings before the bell this morning, and the company's earnings were slightly lower than analyst expectations. But, you know, not from the places we would normally assume when we talk about retailers. Management noted things like insurance claim costs, in legal costs were the reason for lower earnings rather than, I don't know, the thing that was on everyone else is. mind, tariffs and the sentiment of the consumer. But, you know, I think there was actually a bigger theme that we want to hit on here today. And yesterday's show, we talked about targets,

kind of blah earnings, and their sales guidance, along with other retailers, not really looking great for the rest of 2025 as they digest your tariffs and the customer sentiment. But then Walmart came over off the top rope today and basically increased their sales guidance for the rest of the year. So here's my question to both of you. What is your opinion on why Walmart continues to thrive while so many other, we'll call them historically successful and good retailers, Target, for example, seem to be struggling in this current sales environment, even after like a couple years of trying to figure things out post-COVID and all of the challenges that has created. Well, Tyler, I think we have a couple of things going on here. And first and foremost is that

Walmart is cheaper than Target, generally speaking. Now, to be fair, the prices are comparable, but various third-party reports show that Walmart is generally cheaper. And that's kind of a big thing right now in the economy in 2025 with consumers. They're pulling back on spending when possible. Now, so perhaps you like Target's aesthetic better, but in a pinch, you're going to go to Walmart to save a little bit of money. Now, I think it's important to ask why is Walmart cheaper, even just marginally, So, and I think one reason, and it's pretty big, is that Walmart only sources about a third of its products internationally, whereas Target is believed to source more than half of its inventory

from overseas, and specifically from China. That's a pretty big market for Target. And so when we're talking about tariff pressure, Target's going to feel it a little bit more, is therefore a little bit less flexible on its pricing. Walmart has more flexibility and can lower prices and take market share. I think that's what we're seeing happen to a certain degree. Yeah, I agree with John on everything you just said. I would add that consumers have been cutting back on spending, especially on discretionary items. And that was especially true in the second quarter. Remember, this was the Liberation Day quarter when we were kind of at peak economic uncertainty for a while. And Walmart has a long history of doing better when consumers become a little more cost-conscious.

For example, a lot of people don't realize if you haven't been investing that long. Walmart was the best-performing S&P 500 stock during 2008 when the financial crisis was going on. And for good reason, it's sales increased. Their management's reporting no noticeable change in consumer spending. I don't know if that's true across the economy, but it's at least true at Walmart. 4.6% comparable. Same store sales growth is impressive, especially considering targets decline. So impressive quarter.

I want to get into that, too, because it's not just compensated. sales from its existing stores, obviously Walmart is starting to branch out into some other places that most of us probably don't expect as much to be, I would say, tangible drivers of the bottom line, but they're becoming big enough now that they're worth thinking about in terms of investment pieces of Walmart. And Matt, I want to start with you with Omnichannel, which is kind of the fancy word that management likes to use for e-commerce and things like that. So, Do you see this as a key differentiator specifically with this Omnichannel, grocery, delivery, all of that stuff? Or is it kind of just a nice to have for Walmart right now?

I mean, it's really started to make a significant difference in their sales, as you just said. And it's really funny how different retailers have been winning the Omnichannel race at different times. If you had asked me, you know, five years ago when the pandemic first started, I would have said Target was the winner. They were the ones who first made the drive-up parking spaces you could stop and get your stuff at. They were doing a great job of pivoting to Omnichannel retail. But Walmart has just done a fantastic job of building out there on the channel, especially when it comes to groceries. My wife and I prefer to go to Publix, but we get groceries delivered from Walmart because it's easier and cheaper. They've done a great job of that, and it's really resonating with consumers.

And I think that the delivery aspect of it is just going to get bigger. Yeah, and Matt, I want to jump in here as well, talking about Walmart and what it's done with some of these other digital businesses. When you look at advertising, for example, this is an over $4 billion business for Walmart. This is huge. It's high margin. And there's another driver, once again. I mean, maybe overall Walmart's such a huge business. It doesn't seem like much, but it does provide that little incremental boost to the profits.

And so that does give it even more flexibility there again, yet on its pricing. And I think if you look at Target, this is an opportunity. Definitely, it's something that the company is focused on. And look, if you're an advertiser, you want to get in front of big audiences. And Target is still a $100 billion business. So it's still a big business. Advertisers, I think, would like to get in front of that. Target is looking at building out its third-party marketplace,

selling ad slots on its website. So there is an opportunity here for sure. But I think Walmart is farther ahead in its strategy than Target. And so that does give it a little bit more of an advantage. Yeah, the one caveat I'm going to leave with all of the discussion with retailers today was that this was the quarter that basically ended June 30th. And there has been a lot of changes in terms of tariffs, the tariff regime, whether it be China, whether it be individual products and things like that.

And there's still a lot of uncertainty as to whether or how those are going to trickle down into consumers, whether companies like Walmart or Target are going to have to eat those as they start to actually impact prices downstream. And so while this was an interesting quarter from the consumer perspective, I'm really, really interested to see what comes in this third quarter as we start to see some of the impacts of tariff be a little bit more tangible than what they've been. And now coming up, we're going to talk about meta's AI hiring freeze and what that could mean for AI investors. These days I'm all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet.

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Go to QINCE.com slash Motley for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash Motley. Today's theme is a little bit about follow-up questions from some discussions that I had yesterday on the show. We talked yesterday about Sam Altman's quotes to media about AI being in a bubble and some high-flying AI stocks that have been tumbling as of late. And more and more market chatter about, hey, are we in a bubble or something like that? But had I known that this story from the Wall Street Journal that Meta was freezing,

its hiring at its AI division, I think we would have certainly talked about it a lot more, but that's what we're here today to do is kind of dive into this a little bit more. So according to the Wall Street Journal, Meta has frozen hiring at its AI divisions, and is going through what they'll call a corporate overhaul, a little bit of a restructuring. Now, I find this news rather striking, at least on the surface, because it seemed like just a few weeks ago, Meadow was trying to sign other people, leaders in the AI space away from competitors with bonuses in the nine figures. It was, you know, we're talking about like large contracts for some of the biggest sports

players out there. It was, it's like hard to fathom, for me, at least, to see some of those numbers being tossed out. So instead of trying to gaze into the AI crystal ball again like we did yesterday, I want to get to both of your thoughts. more specifically on meta in the AI race, you know, around what could be, well, I would like to categorize a little bit as we could call it erratic spending for meta over the past couple of years, and I don't just mean about AI. It spent a considerable amount of money on its virtual reality venture.

And I think so far, I don't know who would be calling that a resounding success. It seems to be a little bit of a struggle. And this AI spending trajectory, it feels like a little bit of a spend, spend, stop, again, feels a little erratic on the business planning space. Does this news about meta spending, hiring freeze change how you view meta as an investment or how it plans to attack the AI space? For one thing, Facebook is such a successful platform and so profitable that the amounts of money you're talking about a relatively small for the company. Because on one hand, META can burn through billions of dollars on AI spending, and Facebook is still going to keep the company really profitable.

But on the other hand, the strategy does seem to be higher as fast as you can. Don't worry about the money, and then we'll figure it out. From reading the article on this, one of the most striking things to me is META's dividing its AI personnel into four teams, and one of them is internally referred to as the TBD team, meaning to be determined, meaning they don't really have a clear role yet. So I do think the pause is a healthy move. I know I'm the optimist of the three of us here when it comes to things like this, but it seems like it's a, I applaud the move if it results in more organization

and a clearer direction, but it is kind of erratic. You're right. Yeah, I mean, the way that this is getting spun by many outlets is that maybe meta has some sort of a problem, and so they're hitting pause and they're maybe not spending anymore or when it comes to AI. And that's simply not what's going on. MetaPR is out there today, clarifying what's going on.

Yeah, they're hitting pause just to get organized, as Matt said. And, Tyler, as you alluded, they're saying that maybe in some cases they hired people with a $100 million signing bonus. I mean, Starbucks CEO Brian Nichols has one of the largest pay packages I've seen in the restaurant space, and it's not even that. It's like $96 million somewhere in there. So, I mean, META, just to get these people is spending an incredible amount of money. It's got the team, but it needs to get organized now and develop its plan.

So that's what the pause is all about. I say, I agree with Matt. That's a great idea. Let's get organized and let's collect our strategy here. And I agree with Matt as well. Metas earned the right to throw gobs of money at what it wants. It's not like it's not rewarding shareholders. It's repurchasing shares.

It's paying a dividend. and net income is at an all-time high. So it is giving back. It's not being stingy. And at the same time, if you're an investor, you do want it to not hoard its cash. You want it to come up with a big idea that's going to move the needle for the business. Now, obviously, you want to see a return on that investment at some point. And to your point, I don't think we've seen that with the Metaverse.

I don't know if we will see that with the Metaverse. So you definitely want to see that with AI. But I'm not opposed to the company spending generously to build a big strategy. Yeah, very successful businesses do, to a certain degree, have a little bit more leeway when it comes to making big bets and spending a lot of money because, heck, if you make a lot of money, you've got to do something with it. But I think between this story and yesterday's discussion that we had about AI bubbles, there's a common thread I think investors should remember as we start to contextualize the AI world in investing in AI is that progress in this industry and like so many other, other industries isn't going to be, you know, only exponential or go parabolic in the next couple of years. There will be stumbles along the way. The challenges with some of the recent iterations of chat TPT and Lama is that progress will likely come in stepwise functions where we'll see these

breakthroughs and then probably long periods of, you know, flat or frustration with, because the progress seems to get muted for a while. I think this is going to be par for the course for this industry for a while. But, you know, thinking about it from an investor's standpoint and, you know, the tenants that Motley Fool, Hidden Gem investing has been for so long is it's not just about acumen of identifying good ideas. It's also the temperament to hang on to them through the ups and downs. This means both being willing to hold on to businesses you believe in through rough patches and also setting goals and expectations of stocks in which we invest are reasonable. I think trying to bet that this is going to 100x the stock in a couple of years is going to be

unreasonable. So I promise everyone out there, this is not going to be the last time that we talk about the trials and tribulations of AI because it's a great story. It's fun to follow. And a lot of people are going to care about it, but it's not going to be linear. Sometimes it's going to look awesome. Sometimes it's going to look tough. And being able to see through the short-term challenges and holding great businesses over the long-term is one of the advantages that we individual investors have over the institutional world. And we need to use that advantage wisely. And with that, we're going to go on to a quick lightning round after the break.

In a world full of noise, long-term thinking stands out. On the Capital Ideas podcast, Capital Group Leaders explore the decisions that matter most in investing, leadership, and life. It's a rare look inside a firm that's been helping people pursue their financial goals for more than 90 years. Listen to the Capital Ideas podcast from, Capital Group, published by Capital Client Group, Inc. We are going to get into a little bit of a lightning round, short stories, some interesting little nuggets that we saw in the news recently that relate to a lot of companies we love

to talk about. In more than anything, they're kind of fun. So we wanted to hit a whole bunch of different topics and get some quick reactions to it. The first one was, Chipotle is actually looking to get into drone delivery. Matt, you brought this to the table. It was basically the idea that they're going to be testing drone delivery of Chipotle in the Dallas metro area, the thesis being, hey, if we can do drone delivery, we can probably actually facilitate better delivery from fewer kitchens, which would obviously help with efficiency.

So I'm going to ask you both really quick questions here. Tripoli-Trapoli drone delivery. Is this going to make you more likely to order in your area? Look, Tyler, I come from a farming-slash-blue-collar family in Buffalo, New York. We value hard work. This just feels really lazy to get a burrito delivered to me by drone. So, no, I will not be ordering. I'm not more likely to order because of this. It depends. For me, it's not about being lazy or not. It's about efficiency, especially if they could figure out how to get the drone through my third floor window here. So I don't even have to go downstairs. It can just bring me lunch. But this does feel like an interesting move in the post-Bryan-Nickle era. Zipline is the company that they're partnering with. And if you haven't

checked out Zipline, this is one of the cooler private companies out there. doing some really great work in Rwanda with some blood delivered to some remote outposts. So definitely check them out and learn more about it. Always good stories out of sometimes the not the most serious stories. On market reactions, I think we all remember the SPAC boom of 2021. Well, I think we're trying to get another version of that. What do we call that a SPAC after shock after the first earthquake? So, Chameath, Pala-Hapitia.

God, I hope I pronounce that right, is looking to start up the SPAC game again with a recent blank check company with the idea of investing in American exceptionalism. Never blame the guy for marketing, because that seems to be one thing he does extremely well. So the quick question for both of you, what is one lesson you learned from the 2021 SPAC boom bust period that we had that you want to carry into perhaps the next version of a SPAC boom? Yeah, I'd say for me, the big lesson is don't believe any projections you read. Unlike traditional IPOs, when SPACs file with the SEC, they are allowed to make projections, even completely outlandish ones to investors. So don't be caught up at that, evaluate the business

on its own merits. Yeah, for me, I would encourage investors to definitely check out how many shares are being sold to retail investors and how many shares are being held back for insiders and for pipe investors because a lot of times in the past, it was very few shares going out to the retail investors. This created all sorts of supply and demand issues, and then insiders and the pipe investors dumped when the share price spiked. And so you definitely need to understand the incentives behind the SPAC that you're investing in because a lot of times those incentives aren't aligned with retail investors. All right. And then the last one, John, this was for you because I believe

you have a little bit more of a personal connection with Cracker Barrel, but there has been quite a bit of less than hospitable response to Cracker Barrels, we'll call it redesign or marketing repush. So look, I've never been to a Cracker Barrel. There weren't exactly many where I grew up. So somebody who work there, I do have to ask, what do I need to get the first time I go to a Cracker Barrel? Yeah, I worked there right out of high school. What I usually got was the biscuits and gravy because it was cheap on the menu, and I really do like biscuits and gravy. I'd like the chicken fried steak when I'm there. That's always a winner for me. As far as the rebrand goes, I think that Crackerbrill might be barking up the wrong tree.

I don't see their biggest problem as being a customer loyalty problem, a restaurant traffic problem. I mean, there is a little bit of an issue there, but I don't think that's its biggest problem. I think its biggest problem is in-store operations, and those profits that go along. with that. So right now, it's completely redesigning its stores, completely redesigning its aesthetic. I get it. The whole country kitchen idea, it's chic, it could work well, but I think that what Cracker Braille's doing is risking, alienating its loyal customer base. And that is one thing it can't afford to lose. And so I would have liked them to focus more on the menu and the kitchen and how to drive more profits out of their store before they looked at really a major, major overhaul in the branding.

All right, we're going to get out of here. But before we go, a nice way to wrap up the week, let's do three stocks on our radar. Matt, you go first. Yeah, I'm looking at Trex, TREX. It's down pretty big after earnings, but as interest rates hopefully fall over the next two to three years and people are more comfortable with using their home equity to tap it to fund big projects, I could get a major growth tail one. So that's what I'm looking at this week. I'm going to a little bit because, you know, I'm taking the host chair and I'm going to invoke host privileges in doing that. And I'm actually going to, instead of a single stock, I'm going to say I'm looking at small regional banks. There is this handful of banks in the less than $1 billion market

cap range that are all trading well below their tangible book value when national and super regional banks like the Dray P. Morgan's of the world are trading at pretty sizable premiums. Now, most of them don't have the additional functions like wealth management, like those big ones do. and loan books are more related to the communities they serve. But I think credit quality has been very good nationally so far and relatively solid. So it's not as though we're talking about compromised loan books here. So I think there's a compelling pocket of value in these very small, underserved, undercover area of the banking industry.

John, what is on your radar? Yeah, I'm looking at TripAdvisor, ticker symbol, TRIP. And to be honest, I don't really care about the TripAdvisor brand. The company actually owns several brands, including a brand called Viator. Viator is a bookings and experience platform, and it is actually doing really well, and a lot of people don't realize it's there, just kind of buried in the company. It's generated about $900 million in trailing 12-month revenue at a 90% gross margin. It's growing at a double-digit rate.

I think if it was a standalone company, it would honestly be worth somewhere around five-time sales, at least. I mean, you're looking at a $4.5 billion market cap. For perspective, TripAdvisor is worth less than $2 billion. So I'd say that this company is significantly undervalued. I would think at some point, TripAdvisor is going to spin out by a tour and create shareholder value that way. So I'm pretty interested in this company.

A couple fun ideas while everyone's thinking about stocks going into the weekend and certainly away from the big themes of AI and everything else we talked about. So I want to thank Matt, John. Thanks for joining me today and sharing our thoughts on all this stuff. I'm going to hit the disclosure and we can get out of here. As always, people on the program may have interested in the stocks we talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy stocks based solely on what you hear.

All personal finance contact follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out the show notes. For producer Dan Boyd and the rest of the team at Motley Fool Money, I'm Tyler Crow. Thanks for listening and we'll chat again soon.