Walmart is embedding its core online shopping experience for Walmart and Sam’s Club customers directly into Google’s AI chatbot Gemini. The move isn’t about product search getting better, but Walmart making Google its primary customer interface in a world of agent-assisted shopping.

By joining forces with Google, Walmart is essentially changing how it interacts with customers and with its associates. Linking with Gemini is the company’s most recent step toward a more personalized shopping experience.

“We’re at this point rewriting the retail playbook, which is exciting, and we’re trying to close the gap between ‘I want it’ and ‘I have,’” John Furner, incoming CEO of Walmart, said during a keynote address with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on Sunday at NRF.

Keep reading here.—VC

Holiday shopping helped lift retail sales in November, up 0.6% to $735.9 billion from the previous month and 3.3% YoY, the Commerce Department said this week.

October’s retail sales were also revised from flat month over month to down 0.1% from September.

The Commerce Department’s monthly retail sales reporting continues to be delayed due to last year’s government shutdown.

Miscellaneous store retailers had the largest boost, with sales up 1.7% month over month and 16.3% YoY. Grocery sales notched up 0.1% monthly and 2.9% annually, while health and personal care stores rose 0.3% from October and 6.7% YoY. Clothing stores got a 0.9% monthly bump and a 7.5% annual increase.

Sales for nonstore retailers, made up largely of e-commerce sales, were up 0.4% from October and 7.2% YoY, aligning with Adobe Analytics report earlier this month that online spend during the holiday season hit a record $257.8 billion.

Keep reading here.—EC

Prepare for some luxurious going-out-of-business sales. Facing heavy debt and declining revenue, the parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus filed for bankruptcy protection yesterday, a year after the two entities merged in a deal that was supposed to solve everything.

Saks Global owes at least $3.4 billion, the company said in its court filing. Here’s how it got into this mess:

• Saks Fifth Avenue started reporting double-digit sales declines in 2023 amid the beginning of a broader luxury slowdown.
• Last year, investors gave Saks ~$2 billion to fund its acquisition of rival Neiman Marcus (which itself filed for bankruptcy in 2020). The plan was to form a high-end retail powerhouse that would cut costs for Saks and let it catch up on overdue payments to its suppliers.
• Instead, sales at Saks Global kept plunging last year, and it continued to delay hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Chanel, Kering, LVMH, and other luxury groups. Some vendors stopped sending merchandise, leaving store shelves emptier and speeding up the company’s downfall.
• Meanwhile, a $100 million payment on the debt that funded the Neiman acquisition came due in December, and Saks Global couldn’t afford it, even after raising extra financing and selling land under some of its stores.

Keep reading here on Morning Brew.—ML

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s weekly news quiz has been compared to getting a company-wide shout-out from your boss. It’s that satisfying.