Walmart said in February that it wasn’t “immune” from the costs of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Now it’s preparing shoppers to pay more, potentially within weeks.
The retail giant is likely to start rolling out tariff-related price hikes “towards the tail end of this month, and I certainly expect more in June,” Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey told CNBC Thursday, as the company reported earnings that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations. Sales rose by 4.5% at U.S. stores, and the company’s e-commerce business notched its first profitable quarter.
But Rainey said “it’s a challenging environment to operate in retail right now,” speaking separately Thursday to Bloomberg. He indicated that the Trump administration has further to go to resolve cost pressures that have risen at a scale and speed without “historical precedent,” despite recent truces with the U.K. and China — a view analysts have also shared this week on the heels of those agreements.
Several other major brands have recently revised or scrapped their financial outlooks for the rest of the year, saying they’re struggling to game out how ever-shifting White House trade policies will affect their business. Walmart, for its part, maintained its 2025 sales and profit guidance. But it decided not to offer guidance on operating income or earnings per share for the second quarter now underway, due to the “the range of near-term outcomes being exceedingly wide and difficult to predict.”
A number of companies that sell products at Walmart, such as Stanley Black & Decker, Adidas, Mattel and Procter & Gamble, have already raised prices or signaled expected hikes.
“Should the duties go away, there will of course not be price increases,” Adidas CEO Bjorn Gulden said in late April. “But I think we all agree that should this duty stay or even be higher, then of course it will cause a price increase in the market in general.”
Since Trump unveiled sweeping global tariffs on April 2 — and then partially walked them back days later — Walmart’s shares have risen nearly 8%, far outpacing the gains of Target and Costco. Its stock has jumped about 7% so far this year.
Analysts have seen Walmart as relatively well-positioned to handle some of the retail sector’s headwinds. Deutsche Bank researchers said ahead of the company’s earnings report Thursday that it could benefit from shoppers’ “value-seeking behavior” as consumers grow more pessimistic. Walmart’s scale allows it to offer “compelling price points” even as it faces higher costs, they said.
Visits to Walmart locations slid 2.4% in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to Placer.ai. But the foot-traffic analytics firm found visits to Walmart’s Sam’s Club wholesale stores, which are known for bargain prices in bulk, rose 2.7% in the same period. Other membership-based superstores, including BJ’s and Costco, also saw jumps in foot traffic, Placer said.
Indeed, Walmart’s traditional retail business has already been buoyed by its own subscription offering, Walmart+. Members of the $12.97 monthly program accounted for nearly half of the company’s U.S. online spending in its last full fiscal year, shelling out almost three times as much as non-subscriber customers, CNBC reported last month.
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