Walmart reports its weakest sales growth in six years

Result lands during an unusually dramatic mid-August week

Walmart reported its weakest sales growth in six years on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal’s What’s News newsletter. The retailer, described by the Journal as America’s largest, posted what the newsletter characterized as “disappointing earnings.”

The result came during what the Journal described as an unusually dramatic mid-August week. The newsletter reported that “investors are defying the Treasury Department’s attempts to curb borrowing costs, sending yields higher and pressuring data-center hyperscalers.” That Treasury-and-yields dynamic was a separate strand of the week the newsletter summarized, running alongside the corporate-earnings news rather than flowing from it.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 52,759.21 on August 20, 2026.

Walmart’s figures extend a string of recent data signaling that U.S. consumer spending — described in the newsletter as the key engine of domestic economic growth — is softening. The Journal’s separate underlying article on the Walmart result, “Walmart Adds to Wall Street Pressures With Weak Sales Growth,” appeared in the same edition of the paper that carried the newsletter.