You're letting personal feelings about Walmart get in the way of rational thought.

Remember: If not them, Amazon certainly would have done the same.

I agree. Amazon would do the same. I am responding to all the articles that are sympathetic to Wal-Mart.

Emotions aside, it's hard to deny facts:

"Walmart employs an astounding 2.1 million people. In the United States alone, the company employs 1.4 million people. This is a staggering 1% of the U.S.'s 140 million working population."

Those jobs are not well paid compared to small businesses that used to thrive in local communities.

It isn't stupid, it's cheap insurance that your competitor doesn't gain access to your data.

Yes there are ways to make sure Amazon doesn't have easy access to it, while still hosting with them, but they are hard, and at the end of the day, physical access trumps most of those security controls.

Also, Walmart are SUPER paranoid about their internal data.

But they keep prices low. People can go shop at their mom and pop store, but a large majority of people want low prices.

They sell 1/2 a trillion worth of stuff. They have a bigger economic impact on America than google, Facebook,Apple etc.

> People can go shop at their mom and pop store, but a large majority of people want low prices.

People really underestimate how much of an impact this has. Here's a completely made up example. Let's say a person of a family of 4 goes grocery shopping once per week. This person buys 30 grocery items on each shopping trip. The difference between Wal-Mart and the local place might only be $0.25 per item. Is it really worth it to go somewhere else to save $0.25? No, unless you're saving $0.25 on everything you buy.

At $0.25 per item with 30 items each week and 52 weeks in a year, this shopper saves $390/year or a little more than $32/month by going to Wal-Mart. $32/month is pretty meaningless to most people who command a developer's salary, but there is a sizable portion of people in the US who could really use an extra $32 each month. That's the difference between Wal-Mart compared to the local shop, and that's the reason why Wal-Mart edged these small stores out of business.

I shop at Walmart not so much for the monetary savings, but for the time/trip savings. It's a super center, so I can get oil for the trunk and ice-cream for the kids. Otherwise, I'd have to go to O'Reilly's then go 5 ~ 10 miles to get ice-cream, oops forgot to get eggs, think I'll get that lawn chair too etc. It's an offline Amazon.

My family actually drives past regular stores because of the selection at a super center.

Its not stupid to not want to feed money and data about your operations to a direct competitor.

Maybe amazon would look at the data, maybe they wouldn't but if they did they would do it in a way that was nearly 100% impossible to ever prove.

Corporate espionage is a very deep rabbit hole, and goes on far more often than people think it does.

Why give them the opportunity to do so?

It is very hard to do business if you think like that. Do you think Amazon sabotaged Netflix on the day before Thanksgiving a while back to further their own business? I don' think so.

Any specific instance is very difficult to prove, but corporate espionage is so easy to hide it would be foolish not to accept that it is happening at background level.