Inside the secret history of Walmart’s innovator’s dilemma and its decades-long road to e-commerce success

An exterior photo of Walton's Five and Dime storefront, which became the site of the Walmart Museum. (Credit: Brian Vander Brug--Los Angeles Times)

On a summer day in 1998, a longtime Walmart technology employee named Robert Davis marched to the office of then-CEO David Glass with a request that he now believes could have altered the future of the retail industry.

At the time, Davis had been leading a small innovative team inside Walmart that had been successfully experimenting with selling merchandise online since 1993. Davis believed that Walmart had the technology, logistics, and merchandising prowess to lead in this burgeoning space, but he needed buy-in from division leaders to successfully grow the online shopping business.