In fact, not only did Walmart handily outperform the S&P 500 during the Great Recession in 2008, but the stock actually increased.
Matt Frankel: So, that brings us to our number one, which if you’ve be keeping track, you will know that our number one is Walmart.
For this exact reason, they actually were one of the only S&P 500 components, including tech stocks, to grow their sales in 2008.
The only potential negative that I know of is that it’s a low margin business, you can’t sell things as cheaply as Walmart does and make a giant profit margin.
I don’t know, what can we say about Walmart? I see that you guys pretty much agreed with me on this one, so this probably won’t be a long debate.
For exactly the reasons you talked about, if you go back over their marketing campaigns over the past decade, you’ll remember the price rollbacks that kept coming on and on? That was the case, that is so ingrained in consumers’ minds.
But when it comes to certain household items, when it comes to stuff that you have to buy regularly, like toilet paper and paper towels and shampoo and things like that, you can get a better price at Walmart than anywhere.
I’ve got a couple of more, but if you look at what Walmart did during the recession that started in November 2007 and ended in March of 2009, Walmart stock was actually up when every other stock on our list was down.