I’m removed from it, but I’m told Walmart has massive loyalty with suppliers and product aggregators (not sure on the proper term). There are small-shop busines

I’m removed from it, but I’m told Walmart has massive loyalty with suppliers and product aggregators (not sure on the proper term). There are small-shop businesses with a contract responsible for supplying all of one product to Walmart, and that person is the sole supplier to Walmart, and the contract gets re-bid every few years. For example, there’s a “small business” who has a contract to supply all beef jerky to all Walmart’s in the USA. It’s one of Walmart’s keys to pushing prices down, using these middlemen to negotiate pricing on the hundreds of thousands of SKUs, in a game where shaving a few cents off a jar of pickles is the difference in winning or losing a $100mm pickle supply contract. As compared to Amazon, Walmart still has a quality threshold (it demands pickles that the market expects), Amazon doesn’t. The contractor will lose his contract if his suppliers slip on quality or fail to meet delivery requirements.