Walmart Inc. has realized the need to trim down its huge operational expenses but it was not sure where to start -- until it realized it could -- on an unexpected part of its business: shopping bags.
Because of its size as the largest retail company in the globe, Walmart Inc can save millions of bucks by making even the slightest changes to how it runs its day to day operations.
The world's biggest business entity in terms of revenue expects to save a whopping $60 million per year on plastic shopping bags alone. Walmart can do this just by simply changing its process of buying plastic shopping bags and making full advantage of its scale better, Chief Financial Officer Brett Biggs said.
And by reducing the cost of the vests that its employees wear, the company can also save by as much as 15 percent by making the vests out of recyclable materials, Biggs stated.
Walmart is on also course to save $100 million each year by centralizing how the company maintains the equipment in its stores and make them more energy-efficient, Biggs explained.
The remarks were made after Walmart disclosed its fourth-quarter sales after the closing bell on Tuesday. The announcement also coincided on the same day Walmart hosted an investment community affair.
The American retail giant had said during its annual stockholders meeting in Arkansas last year that it would save around $30 million for the current year just by upgrading its existing inventory of stepping stools and ladders in its distribution branches with a lighter-weight type.
This is not the first time the company has announced a savings program from a random perspective of its operations. In October 2018, Walmart announced it would save $20 million per year by using a new kind of floor wax that costs less and allows for easier and faster cleaning.
The company had also previously bared it was saving at least $200 million by changing the lightbulbs in its stores and parking lots.
It also said Tuesday that its "Fast Unloader System", which scans and sorts products as they are unloaded from vans and is used in over 1,700 Walmart stores today, reduces around 75 percent of the time of the unloading process, compared to when it is done manually by workers.
In the stock market late Tuesday, shares of Walmart rose around 1 percent. Its stocks have rallied a little more than 20 percent in the last four quarters. The retail firm has a market cap of around $338.5 billion.
