Walmart shares fell as much as 8.9% in Thursday trading after the retailer's US same-store sales growth came in well below Wall Street's forecast, a rare miss for a chain that has spent the past two years posting some of the most consistent comp numbers in US retail. Sales at US stores open more than a year grew 2.6% in the quarter, against analyst expectations of 3.7% to 3.8%, according to Walmart's official Q2 FY27 earnings release.
The headline numbers elsewhere in the report were stronger: total revenue grew 5.9% year over year, adjusted operating income rose 28.8%, and both earnings per share and total revenue beat Street estimates. Global e-commerce grew 23%, and Walmart Connect, the company's advertising arm, grew 43% in the US excluding VIZIO — bright spots that underline how much of Walmart's growth is now coming from digital and advertising rather than foot traffic and basket size at physical stores.
A Read on the US Consumer
The gap between the comp-sales miss and the otherwise solid results has fed a narrower but sharper question among investors: are American shoppers spending less per visit even as they keep showing up. Walmart is typically read as one of the more reliable barometers of lower- and middle-income household spending because of its scale and its mix of grocery and general merchandise, so a same-store sales slowdown centered on the US, rather than international operations, tends to draw outsized attention regardless of what the rest of the earnings report shows.
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Why It Matters Beyond Retail
The miss lands in the same week the US Treasury moved to expand bond buybacks and Federal Reserve minutes showed some officials still pushing for a rate hike over persistent inflation — a combination that makes any sign of consumer fatigue more consequential for markets pricing the path of rates. If a company with Walmart's scale and pricing power is seeing shoppers pull back on discretionary spend even slightly, that tends to move through the rest of consumer-facing equities faster than a single earnings report usually would, and it complicates the argument that the economy can keep absorbing higher-for-longer rates without a visible slowdown in demand.
