Name: Inside Walmart’s New 350-Acre HQ
Uploaded: 2025-05-14
Duration: 10 min 5 s

Walmart is making a big change in how it operates—and it starts in Bentonville, Arkansas. Fortune gets an inside look at the retail giant’s brand-new, 350-acre campus. Long known for its no-frills roots, Walmart is now investing big in its hometown to attract top-tier talent, modernize its culture, and compete with tech giants like Amazon. Here’s a closer look at how the United States’ largest employer is reinventing itself.

Inside Walmart’s New 350-Acre HQ

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Walmart is making a big change in how it operates—and it starts in Bentonville, Arkansas. Fortune gets an inside look at the retail giant’s brand-new, 350-acre campus. 

This 350 acre campus is the site of Walmart's new headquarters, a huge bet on in-person work. This home base is a big tool for talent attraction as well. And it's all taking shape here in Bentonville, Arkansas. The ability to recruit talent is so much easier now that we have built our campus. People really have the desire to come together. With over $600 billion in annual revenue and 1.6 million US employees, Walmart is both the nation's largest company and its largest private employer, but it's also faced a lot of questions over its labor practices, store wages, and whether it can compete with Amazon. Now the company is turning inward, investing heavily in an amenity-packed headquarters meant to attract top tier talent and reshape its corporate culture. This sprawling new campus includes 12 office buildings, workout facilities, 2 miles of bike trails, a childcare center, and even a hotel. The facilities opened officially in January, but the rollout will continue in phases throughout 2025. So this is our campus welcome center. It's got our first original Walmart sign and kind of size to the very early Walmart stores for the company. Walmart's roots run deep in northwest Arkansas, where Sam Walton opened the first store in 1962. Since then, the region has been the heart and soul of the retail giant. Company and the board said we're going to invest in a new place to work. It's really easy for us to decide we're staying in Bentonville, a place that built us. In the last 10 years, quite a few large companies have inaugurated new headquarters. Was there anything out there, you know, common mistake that you said, you know, you can learn from others in advance. Is there anything that you said, OK, well, let's let's avoid that. So other campuses that were doing larger urban settings or maybe sort of had the luxury of being Walled off from their community we knew we didn't want to be that we knew that the lines between work and life continued to blur and great company campuses can be very productive spaces and stay alive in the evenings and the weekends. So for us we knew that we didn't want to kind of single ourselves away. In fact, we went all the way in the other direction and we've really tried to make it feel like this campus is great for Walmart and great for Bentonville. This is a great example of a bike garden, so these are at every entry, covered bike parking. Our aspiration is to get 10% of our associates actively commuting through alternate ways. That focus on merging Walmart in Bentonville has helped to find the look and feel of the campus, but it's not just changing Walmart, it's transforming Bentsonville. Since 2020, the county population has increased by 13%, and the average home price has gone up over 70%. And it's not just home prices. Residents are seeing an increase in property taxes and the cost of water doubling. And as the Waltons continue to announce new investments, there are no signs of Northwest Arkansas seeing a slowdown in growth. So I want to connect this a little bit to Bentonville. Bentonville, I was shocked when I took my taxi and saw a population of 54,000, whatever it is, and it was pretty sleepy not long ago. It's not a metropolis yet, you know, but is it part of that idea that people can come to Bentonville and have a lot of the amenities that they would find. In a Seattle or in a New York City, I would argue it's even better than Seattle or other places because the sentiment that we hear from the recruiting side is that this is a town where people feel like it has that small town feel, you know, it does really feel like you're building, you're coming into a community, but it does have Access to a lot of the larger city amenities if you look at our beautiful healthcare center, the beautiful green space we have access to great food, great restaurants, culture museums, it really does have it all, if you will. So while it might not be the big metropolis, you know, of a New York or other places, it really has the Best of both worlds. So from your point of view, what is it about the facilities that fosters the culture and interaction, because you know a physical space is a physical space, and there has to be, you can't just say, OK, all of you go work in these buildings and you'll have a culture and you'll collaborate more. So what has to accompany the physical amenities? Speaking as a talent person, I will say you have to have the right talent in the right roles. That's like job number one. But I will also say going back, gosh, during the pandemic when all of the spaces were being designed and they solicited input from the experts in learning, right, the experts in tech, etc. So it really was designed with the, how shall I say, end user in mind, of which is the associate. It's all part of a transformation Walmart hopes will help redefine its image from legacy retail giant to forward thinking employer of choice. This is a place we call the library. May you asked me if there was anything we changed during the pandemic, and this is a great illustration of a lesson learned, maybe an enhancement that we made. You spent years with people in their homes, in their offices, in their living rooms, on their patios, and I've learned a lot about our associates just from zooming with them in this space made me realize people really embrace the residential nature of their home. They like to have comfortable places to occupy. So tell us a bit about the former Home Office, which had been the Home Office for what, about 50 years, more or less a quite a long time. Yes. What were the shortcomings there that guided, you think the construction of all this and to your mind is more conducive to the culture, I think the The challenge with the old home office, it was, it was wonderful. It suited our culture. I think the challenge with the older campus was it was a bit spread out, so it was probably a little less convenient, you know, to interact and connect and collaborate than obviously this new campus is doing. The old Walmart home office was housed in a former warehouse. There was minimal light and reflected the frugal ethos of the company. To get a better sense of the past, I went to the Walmart Museum in the town square. It's filled with artifacts like Sam Walton's truck and office and even has a Sam Walton hologram. We're going to go inside, have a look at some of the historical high points of this company and what has created the culture that the new home office recently opened seeks to preserve and enhance. So here we are looking at a replica of Sam Walton's original office that was housed at the previous Home Office with the common thread. You know, one thing Walmart always talks about is our values are timeless, but change is constant, and one of the things that I'm really proud about as a 23 year Walmart associate is. The investment in new workspaces, being able to bring all of our teams together. Historically in Bentonville we've been spread out across 29 buildings all over town and the new home office brings all those different teams together to really unlock being more effective and efficient in person. Really. Let me introduce myself. My name is Sam. For decades, Walmart's focus was outward, pouring billions into logistics, supply chain infrastructure, and international expansion. It was all part of a race to stay ahead of rivals like Amazon, whose dominance in e-commerce has reshaped how Americans shop. And now that many of the largest companies in the country have built state of the art headquarters, Walmart has felt the pressure to keep up. I think coming out of the. pandemic, there's a real need and desire for people to connect with each other, to create community, come together to grow and learn, and I think the campus, the way that it's been designed, has really facilitated that already. So that's what I think the overarching purpose is. You know, there was a time, for example, some of the e-commerce teams were out west and You know, it can be a little disparity. It's the idea here to create one unified Walmart, you know, we're not talking about the store employees, but The corpus, is that the idea behind all of this? Yeah, I think yes, and we're still going to have hubs. We have hubs on the west coast where a lot of our tech talent is, East Coast in New Jersey. We have teams there as well, but the goal is, you know, our culture is present anywhere where we are, and so we'll continue to have that. And go to where the talent is, but know that those teams also come here and work together as well. So this is sort of the heartbeat, if you will, of Walmart, but now that we have other locations where we'll continue to, you know, build our teams as well. You have a sense of what tech talent wants or what, you know, somebody who would be going. A luxury retailer wants. So the point of all this as well is to give those employees the amenities that in a way the market says people with their skills should have access to. Yeah, absolutely. The candidates that we're bringing here, they are inspired, and I think the inspiration comes from not just the beauty of the campus, the green spaces, etc. but it's The ease in which we can connect now on campus. In fact, our sentiment data that's shared with us, our candidates that come in are 3 times more likely to be open to moving to Northwest Arkansas because they've come here, they've visited, they've experienced the area, they've experienced our campus, and they feel our culture.