Walmart’s latest shock profit warning tells us a lot about the post-pandemic world

US retail giant Walmart has issued its second profit warning in ten weeks as consumer spending habits shift. That’s bad news for Walmart, says John Stepek – but is it bad news for the rest of the economy?

Walmart customer
Walmart's “back to school” season has started well
(Image credit: © Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Walmart issued a profit warning earlier this week. It was the second such warning from one of the world’s largest retailers in ten weeks.

Markets aren’t used to warnings from Walmart. Now they’ve had two in a row.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.