A crisis, as they say, is a terrible thing to waste. With digital shopping at a fevered pitch, Walmart this week crunched its disparate e-commerce operations into a single app and dust-binned the Jet.com name, a business that it bought for $3.3 billion just four years ago. None of this was particularly surprising. The moves were years in the making. What's notable is how quickly Walmart finally flipped the switch. The company is now fulfilling online orders from 2,400 stores and delivering goods in less than two hours from 1,000 of those stores. It's another example of a business seizing the pandemic opportunity namely because it had been prepping for years. A couple weeks ago, wedetailed similar savvy execution at Tractor Supply, which has figured out same-day delivery in the middle of nowhere. Walmart's e-commerce sales were up 74% in the quarter ended April 30 and the number of customers ordering online has quadrupled since mid-March. None of this would have happened, mind you, if Walmart hadn't spent last year blocking and tackling next-day delivery for three-quarters of the country.Groceries, however, offer razor thin margins to begin with and e-commerce is costlier than analog shelf-stocking, particularly with the onerous staffing and distancing logistics presented by COVID. In short, Walmart's grocery app will get a big profit boost from toys, televisions and all the other dreck that just got plunked onto the platform. "We don't ask customers to make two trips to the store ... so we shouldn't ask them to visit two apps," Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside explained.Come for the toilet paper and strawberries, stay for the TVs and Nikes. Walmart will bring it all to you, hold it for you in the store, carry it out to the curb. If you ask nicely, they'll probably run it up your fire escape or drop it in your end-of-days bunker. It follows that Amazon.com is playing defense for the first time. Target appears to be taking share as well. Even Etsy is getting a Covid bump. Amazon's share of online spending fell from 42 percent to34 percent as lockdowns took hold.As for Jet.com, Walmart is casting the splashy purchase as another incremental win. CEO Doug McMillon said the startup brought a slug of talent, a slew of fulfillment centers and a bevy of brands that deigned to do business with Walmart's big boxes. We may never know if Jet.com was a busted play, but Walmart is certainly running up the digital score. Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, May 25, 2020. Subscribe now. Photo illustration: Justin Metz; Photos: Getty Images (8) Photographer: Photo illustration: Justin Metz; Photos: Getty Images (8) | 
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