Walmart Adopts Virtual Reality To Train Its Workforce For Black Friday

Staring down a seemingly endless aisle of products, including an entire grocery store-within-a-store, it seems like the shopping never ends at Walmart’s Santa Clarita Supercenter, 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. Inside, through an entryway wedged between freezer cases full of seafood, past employee locker rooms, behind a door with a frosted glass logo — a Walmart icon superimposed on a graduate’s cap and tassel —one version of computerized commerce never stops. This space attached to the retail floor is one of Walmart’s roughly 200 training academies, part of a two-year-old initiative to improve and expand training of the company’s roughly 1.2 million employee associates, the front-line workforce that meets, greets, and checks out customers. Contrary to many people’s perception of the low-cost leader, this training effort is very high-tech. Last year, the academies began offering lessons in virtual reality. Read more at Vox.