Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who turned America’s largest retailer into a tech-powered giant and spearheaded a period of robust sales growth since becoming chief executive in 2014, plans to retire early next year, the company said Friday in a surprise announcement.
John Furner, 51, the head of Walmart’s U.S. operations, will take over on Feb. 1, the day after McMillon’s retirement becomes effective, the company said. Although McMillon is set to spend a year advising his successor, Walmart shares fell 3% immediately in premarket trading after the news of the unexpected leadership change.
Unlike Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Tesla’s Elon Musk, McMillon isn’t a household name, but he played a key role in the U.S. economy. Walmart’s performance serves as a barometer of consumer spending given its size and vast customer base. The company maintains that 90% of U.S. households rely on Walmart for a range of products, and more than 150 million customers shop on its website or in its stores every week.
Walmart is also the nation’s largest private employer, with 1.6 million workers.
The pending CEO switch comes at a challenging time for retail companies and other employers that have spent almost 11 months navigating an uncertain economic environment as President Donald Trump’s administration adopted volatile policies on tariffs and initiated an immigration crackdown that threatened to shrink the supply of workers.
McMillon started with Walmart in 1984 and became chief executive three decades later. During his tenure as CEO, he invested heavily in employees by increasing wages, expanding parental leave, and launching a program for employees seeking advancement and education opportunities to earn certificates and degrees.
Under his leadership, Walmart has been laser-focused on maintaining low prices while embracing new technology like artificial intelligence and robotics.
“Over more than a decade as CEO, Doug led a comprehensive transformation by investing in our associates, advancing our digital and e-commerce capabilities, and modernizing our supply chain,” Walmart Chairman Greg Penner, the son-in-law of the late Walmart founder Sam Walton, said. “He leaves Walmart stronger, more innovative, and better aligned with our purpose to help people save money and live better.”
Furner started at Walmart in 1993, working as an hourly store associate in Bentonville, Arkansas, where the company is based. He served as president and CEO of the U.S. division of Sam’s Club, the membership warehouse-store chain that Walmart owns, before taking the same roles at Walmart U.S.
Under McMillon, Walmart’s annual revenue has grown from $485.7 billion to $681 billion in its latest fiscal year. Its stock was hovering around $25 per share when he came to the helm; now, it is over $102.
When he became CEO, stores were messy and worker morale was low. McMillon thought the company needed to increase pay and create pathways for hourly workers to advance in their careers. In 2015, Walmart announced a three-year, $2.7 billion investment to increase wages and create new education and training opportunities.
But when McMillon briefed investors that year and cut the annual sales forecast, investors weren’t happy, sending Walmart shares down and destroying $21.5 billion in market value in hours. The company gradually regained investors’ confidence with higher sales, new customers, and greatly improved employee retention rates.
Walmart also invested heavily in e-commerce and faster deliveries. The company said in August that roughly one-third of recent deliveries from its U.S. stores involved orders asking for goods to arrive in three hours or less, and 20% of those orders made it to customers in a half-hour or under.
Walmart has also looked for new sources of revenue like advertising and launched a membership program called Walmart+ to compete with Amazon Prime, its rival’s free shipping program.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Walmart powered through worldwide supply chain kinks and saw a sales surge as homebound consumers stocked up. Walmart used its clout with suppliers again to maintain low prices and attract more customers during the period of inflation that followed the pandemic.
The company has said it is absorbing some of the extra import costs from Trump’s tariffs on foreign goods, but that customers would see some price increases.
“We’re doing what we said we would do,” McMillon told stock analysts in August. “We’re keeping our prices as low as we can for as long as we can. Our merchants have been creative and acted with urgency to avoid what would have been additional pressure for our customers and members.”
President Donald Trump says he's asking the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Democrats linked to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including former President Bill Clinton, who he alleged "spent large portions of their life" with the disgraced financier.
"I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump's call came after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released emails obtained from Epstein's estate in which the late financier, who was friends with Trump for more than a decade, alleged the president "knew about the girls." "I am the one able to take him down," Epstein wrote in another email.
Trump also railed against Republicans working with Democrats to force the full release of Epstein's federal case files, calling them "soft and foolish" in a social media post, and urged them to stop digging into his relationship with the disgraced financier.
"Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish. Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrats’ problem, not the Republicans’ problem!" Trump wrote. "Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Sommers about Epstein; they know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!"
Epstein socialized with the rich, famous, and members of academia, many of whom were criticized following his 2019 sex trafficking indictment for maintaining ties to him after he'd pleaded guilty in 2008 to state child prostitution charges in Florida.
Clinton hosted Epstein at the White House in the 1990s and traveled on Epstein’s jet. Summers was Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, and kept up a casual email relationship with Epstein as recently as 2017, according to emails released this week.
Epstein was a longtime client of JPMorgan Chase, which was accused of facilitating Epstein’s trafficking ring. The bank reached a nine-figure settlement with Epstein’s accusers after they sued over the bank’s role in Epstein’s finances.
Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, helped facilitate donations from Epstein to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Trump threat comes amid House push for DOJ to release all Epstein files
Democrats had enough support as of this week to override Republican leaders in the House and bring a bill to the floor that would compel the Department of Justice to release its remaining files on Epstein, who died by suicide while he was in jail awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges. Four Republicans signed on, including Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
The other Republicans were Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has been leading the push alongside Democrat Ro Khanna of California to bring the legislation to the House floor.
With the swearing-in this week of Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva, the discharge petition reached the 218-vote threshold. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he will hold a vote on the bill sometime next week. It would also need to pass the Senate.
Massie accused Johnson, Trump, Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel of trying to kill the petition in a statement to USA TODAY on Nov. 14.
"Next week could be big for survivors of Epstein’s sex trafficking scheme because we are forcing a recorded vote in the House on releasing the Epstein files," Massie said. "President Trump and Speaker Johnson can still be on the right side by encouraging a YEA vote.”
Trump's name came up in emails that Democrats obtained from Epstein's estate and released on Nov. 12, prompting a new wave of scrutiny on his friendship with the convicted sex offender. The president says he had a falling out with Epstein after he "stole" young female workers from him, and the White House said their friendship ended because Epstein was a creep.
One of the Epstein emails alleged Trump “knew about the girls." Another said that Trump "spent hours at my house" with one of the victims. Republicans have since identified that person as prominent Epstein accuser and former Trump employee Virginia Giuffre, a former spa attendant at his Palm Beach resort, who did not level accusations against Trump. Trump has forcefully denied any wrongdoing in what he calls the "Epstein hoax."
"These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week.
Giuffre died by suicide in April. She said in a sealed deposition for a defamation lawsuit against Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell that she was forced as a teenager to have sex with powerful men.
Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Almost a quarter of U.S. households are living paycheck to paycheck in 2025, according to new data from the Bank of America Institute.
Nearly 30% of lower-income households are living off of their paychecks, about a two percentage point increase from 2023, while less than 25% of middle-income earners are living paycheck to paycheck, and less than 20% of high-earners are doing so, the survey found.
Wage growth in lower- and middle-income households hasn’t kept up with the rate of inflation this year, meaning the rising cost of goods has grown faster than income for a large portion of the country. The bank estimates that middle-income households’ wages grew 2% year-over-year, and lower-income wages increased just 1% year-over-year in October.
Lower-income Millennial and Gen X households have been hit the hardest, according to the survey released Monday. Households living paycheck to paycheck based in the Northeast and Midwest increased this year, while those in the South and in the West actually decreased.
“The South and West had some of the lowest inflation rates in the country last year, likely easing some of the financial burden for consumers in these regions,” Joe Wadford, economist at the Bank of America Institute, said in the survey, noting that inflation is beginning to rise in these areas. “So, in our view, it is possible that these rising costs may renew or expand financial pressure on consumers in these areas after only a brief respite.”
The paycheck-to-paycheck data is based on a sample of U.S.-based households that primarily bank with Bank of America. The survey defined living paycheck to paycheck as a household’s “necessity spending,” which it categorized as childcare, gas, groceries, housing, insurance, and more — exceeding 95% of their income.
The U.S. and Switzerland have reached a trade deal, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CNBC on Friday.
Duties will be reduced to 15%, the Swiss government said in a post on X, adding that further details will be announced at 4 p.m. local time.
As part of the deal, Swiss companies have pledged to invest some $200 billion in the U.S. by the end of 2028, which includes funding for education and training, according to a statement by the Swiss government.
“We’ve essentially reached a deal with Switzerland,” Greer told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday morning.
“They’re going to send a lot of manufacturing here to the United States — pharmaceuticals, gold smelting, railway equipment — so we’re really excited about that deal and what it means for American manufacturing.”
Greer added that more details on the deal, which he said had “really been in the works since April,” would later be published on the White House website.
The deal means the country-specific tariff imposed on Swiss goods will match the rate levied on those brought to the U.S. from the European Union.
“Like all the president’s deals, we keep a tariff,” Greer said on Friday. “We retain a tariff on these countries because we have to get the trade deficit under control. But because Switzerland, for example, has agreed to manage its trade surplus with the United States, in terms of making sure that things where they have a trade surplus with us — pharmaceuticals, gold, et cetera — their companies are going to build here, so it’s going to eliminate some of the sources of that surplus.”
He pointed to Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, which pledged earlier this year to invest $50 billion in the U.S.
“The announcement of the reduction in additional US tariffs on Swiss imports will serve to stabilise bilateral trade relations,” the Swiss government said in its Friday statement. “Although overall tariffs remain higher than before the additional tariffs were introduced in April, the agreed reduction in additional tariffs is expected to have a positive impact on the Swiss economy.”
Back in July, President Donald Trump announced Switzerland would be hit with a 39% tariff rate, which took hold when a Swiss delegation failed to secure a deal with U.S. officials during last-ditch talks in Washington.
That meant Switzerland was subject to one of the highest tariff rates imposed on an individual country by the Trump administration.
Switzerland, an export-driven economy, has already taken a hit from the tariffs. Last month, Swiss officials cut the country’s economic growth forecast for 2026, citing the “heavy burden” of the U.S. duties on its industries.
Its biggest exports include watches, pharmaceuticals, and precious metals, but the country is also renowned for its luxury goods, chocolate, and skincare products.
The Swiss franc added 0.4% against the greenback following the trade deal announcements on Friday.
The economy is projected to grow by 4% this quarter, but as the holiday shopping season arrives, consumers aren't feeling the optimism. Whether it's the wealthy seeking bargains, Gen Z spending less, or lower earners cutting non-essentials, the trends are concerning, CNBC notes. Consumer sentiment is near record lows, with shoppers squeezed by inflation, a shrinking job market, and tariffs. Per one survey, 24% of those making at least $100,000 plan to spend less this holiday season, which could hurt retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Home Depot.