Walmart prices only rose about 1% across the board in Q4: CFO

Yahoo Finance Video and Brian Sozzi

Fri, February 20, 2026 at 3:30 AM GMT+9

In this video:

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It’s coming up on one year since President Trump implemented his Liberation Day tariff policies in April 2025. Are consumers beginning to see any relief for tariff-inflated prices on goods?

Walmart CFO John David Rainey sits down with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi to comment on the consumer spending and price trends the retailer has reported as it tries to balance pricing pressures directly tied to tariffs.

Also be sure to catch Yahoo Finance’s full interview with John David Rainey.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Catalysts.

Video Transcript

00:00 Speaker A

We’re we’re coming up and believe it or not, really on on liberation Day. That that one-year market feels like yesterday. I still I’m trying to forget that day. I mean, I think I slept at the office. But, uh, the tariff related inflation. Has it been as much of an impact as we initially thought and are we beyond the worst of that for a retailer like Walmart?

00:20 Speaker B

Yeah, certainly if we were talking and having this conversation a year ago, I’d probably have a lot more concern than I do right now. I think in part because of the way that our teams have have managed that that tariff uh inflation. We’ve done a really good job of trying to minimize the the impact on consumers and being very thoughtful and choiceful about where we absorb some of those higher price increases versus where we might need to pass that along. If you look at the most recent quarter, like for like inflation across the basket of items at Walmart was up only a little bit more than 1%. And show that shows you that we’re we’re working hard to try to minimize the impact on our customers and members. And we still have a couple more months to go before we we lap that liberation day that you said, but I it feels to me like we’ve certainly seen the peak or coming coming close to seeing the peak of some of the uh the tariff related cost increases.

01:14 Speaker A

Where will consumers start to actually see prices fall? I mean, is that through the produce and in the fresh food area just given how quickly those items turn every day?

01:26 Speaker B

Yeah, food is the area right now that I would say is probably most likely to be, uh certainly disinflationary but maybe even deflationary. Um when we looked at the 1% like for like inflation across the basket of items, the way that breaks down on our business is food inflation was a little bit less than that and general merchandise was a little bit more than that. One of the key contributors there is egg prices. Egg prices have come down appreciably from where they were a year ago and you’d be amazed at how much that um impacts the overall basket of inflation. So we’re we’re continuing to look to to see that, you know, food prices could come down. And it’s really important for us because fresh as an item in produce, um is something that’s a basket driver. We see that when someone’s buying fresh in our stores, baskets tend to be about 25% higher. So that level of engagement and that additional level of spend is really important to our bottom line.

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