An “embarrassment of riches” at the box office could fuel a $1.2 billion year for IMAX, CEO Rich Gelfond told CNBC on Friday.

That volume would mark the best box office haul for the company, which specializes in high-resolution cameras, film formats, projectors and theaters.

“I think it’s going to be a very strong year,” Gelfond said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “The first thing that drives that is the slate.”

Gelfond pointed to several blockbuster titles slated for release in the next 10 months, including a new “Mission Impossible,” a live-action “How to Train Your Dragon” film, another “Jurassic Park” installment, a sequel to “Zootopia” and a third “Avatar” release.

Hollywood production issues led to fewer theatrical releases and smaller ticket sales in 2024, with box office receipts down 3.4% from 2023 to $8.74 billion. Already, the 2025 slate appears more robust, with more titles and bigger franchise films.

Aiding IMAX’s lofty box office goals is the Chinese title “Ne Zha 2,” which has already garnered $1.6 billion globally. It is the first film to have topped $1 billion in a single country. Gelfond noted that IMAX accounted for $135 million of the film’s total box office.

“We’ve done more box office in China in the first six weeks of this year than we did the whole year last year,” he said.

He added that “Ne Zha 2” is doing “like $100 million a day,” and that IMAX has accounted for around 13% of the film’s box office receipts.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal is the distributor of “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Jurassic World Rebirth.”

The largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange said Friday that the Securities and Exchange Commission would drop its lawsuit against it, a signal that the Trump administration plans to take a friendlier approach to the broader crypto industry.

In a release it titled ‘Righting a major wrong,’ the exchange, Coinbase, said SEC staff had agreed in principle to dismiss a suit filed during the Biden administration. The suit accused Coinbase of acting as an unregistered securities broker.

The agency must still vote to formally drop the suit.

A representative for the SEC declined to comment on Coinbase’s announcement. 

‘I think it is a really important signal that a small group of activists in the prior administration who tried to unlawfully attack this industry — we are able to turn page on that and finally get regulatory clarity in America,’ Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in an interview on CNBC on Friday morning.

Coinbase shares were up 5% in premarket trading. Bitcoin prices were up 1%.

The move to drop the suit would serve to make good on President Donald Trump’s campaign commitment to roll back the strict enforcement of the crypto industry that occurred under then-President Joe Biden. Trump has promised to make the United States the ‘crypto capital of the world,’ and has launched his own meme coin.

In its original suit, the SEC said Coinbase’s alleged actions were depriving investors of ‘critical protections, including rulebooks that prevent fraud and manipulation, proper disclosure, safeguards against conflicts of interest, and routine inspection by the SEC.’

“You simply can’t ignore the rules because you don’t like them or because you’d prefer different ones: the consequences for the investing public are far too great,” Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, said at the time.

To date, the SEC has not categorized bitcoin as a security. The crypto industry has long complained that, under former Chair Gary Gensler, the agency took an overly critical posture toward the industry while failing to provide clear ‘rules of the road’ and work with it to develop a means for it to operate legally.

Lawsuits against two other exchanges, Binance and Kraken, are still pending.

‘We tried to ‘come in and register’ but it turned out it was a fake offer, as every crypto company discovered,’ Armstrong wrote in a separate post on X on Friday, referring to the Biden administration’s previous actions concerning the crypto industry.

‘Regulators are supposed to enforce the law, but they can’t make up new laws on the spot if they don’t like the current ones, or weaponize a lack of clarity in the law.’

Executives at Meta stand to get bigger bonuses this year. 

The company said in a corporate filing Thursday that it had approved “an increase in the target bonus percentage” for its annual bonus plan for executives. Meta’s named executive officers could earn a bonus of 200% of their base salary under the new plan, up from the 75% they earned previously, according to the filing. 

The updated bonus plan doesn’t apply to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the filing noted.

A committee for Meta’s board of directors approved the change on Feb.13 after determining that the “target total cash compensation” for its executives “was at or below the 15th percentile of the target total cash compensation of executives holding similar positions” at peer companies. 

“Following this increase, the target total cash compensation for the named executive officers (other than the CEO) falls at approximately the 50th percentile of the Peer Group Target Cash Compensation,” the filing said.

The disclosure of the new executive bonus plan comes a week after Meta began laying off 5% of its overall workforce. The company had previously said this would impact its lowest performers.

Meta also slashed its annual distribution of stock options by about 10% for thousands of employees, according to a report published Thursday by the Financial Times. The report noted that the stock option reduction may differ based on where the workers live and their position at the company.

Meta shares are up more than 47% over the past year and closed Thursday at $694.84, underscoring investor enthusiasm over the social media company’s growing sales in the digital advertising market and the potential for its artificial intelligence investments to eventually generate big returns.

The company said in January that its fourth-quarter revenue grew 21% year over year to $48.39 billion.

Meta did not reply to a request for comment.

Amazon has dethroned Walmart in quarterly revenue for the first time ever.

Amazon said earlier this month that it brought in $187.8 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter. That beat Walmart’s sales for the period, which came in at $180.5 billion, the company reported on Thursday.

Since 2012, Walmart has held the distinction of being the top revenue generator each quarter, a title it gained after overtaking oil giant Exxon Mobil.

Walmart still leads the way in annual sales, though Amazon is gaining ground. Walmart is projected to reel in $708.7 billion in the fiscal year ahead while Amazon’s full-year revenue for 2025 is expected to reach $700.8 billion, according to FactSet.

Amazon’s core retail unit remains its biggest revenue generator, but its top line is also being fueled by its massive cloud computing, advertising and seller services businesses. Third-party seller services, which includes commissions and fees collected by Amazon on fulfillment and shipping, advertising and customer support, accounted for 24.5% of the company’s total sales last year. Amazon Web Services was responsible for nearly 17%.

Walmart has looked to its chief rival for ways to sustain sales growth. The company operates a third-party marketplace and offers sellers fulfillment services, although both businesses are a fraction of the size of Amazon’s. Walmart has also launched an advertising business and a loyalty program for shoppers, called Walmart+, that competes with Amazon Prime.

— CNBC’s Robert Hum contributed to this report.

Cameo wants workers back in the office more often, and it’s paying them each $10,000 to show up.

Starting this week, workers at the celebrity video-greeting app are reporting into the company’s Chicago headquarters Monday through Thursday. In exchange, the roughly two dozen eligible employees can expect a $10,000 annual raise, free lunch, free parking and access to an onsite gym.

″‘Roll out the red carpet’ is our first corporate value, and we really felt like we wanted to make HQ a perk, not a punishment,” Cameo CEO Steven Galanis tells CNBC Make It. “We know we’re asking more out of you to give up the flexibility, and we wanted to compensate you for it.”

Many workers say they’d take a pay cut to be able to keep working from home. Cameo is hoping the inverse will be true.

Galanis and his leadership team landed on a $10,000 annual raise because the sum is “meaningful for everybody,” especially junior employees: “That might be the difference between them being able to get an apartment in the city or having to take the train because they live with their parents in the suburbs.”

Cameo currently has 50 employees, including 26 in Chicago and others around the U.S. and internationally, though most remote workers are concentrated in New York and Los Angeles. The new benefit doesn’t apply to workers outside of Chicago, though “if they wanted to move to Chicagoland, we would give them a [relocation benefit] and they’d be eligible,” Galanis says.

Cameo’s Chicago headquarters opened during the summer of 2024, but leaders never set a schedule of when they expected employees to be in. Without it, workers generally reported to the office two to three times in the middle of the week, Galanis says.

The new four-day policy was announced to staff a month ago. Galanis is reluctant to call it a mandate but says “there wasn’t an ability to opt out.”

“If you live in Chicagoland, you are four days a week in-office — there wasn’t an option on that. And in exchange, we give you a $10,000 raise.”

“If you wanted to move, you could do that” and not be subject to the in-office expectation, Galanis says.

Galanis says none of Cameo’s employees quit the company or moved away from Chicago following the policy announcement. A few outside of Chicago have indicated possibly moving closer to headquarters given the new perks.

Remote workers can also take part in Cameo’s Team Week, launched this summer, where they can be flown to Chicago once a month for a defined week when “everybody’s in,” Galanis says. Since the company covers flights, accommodations and some meals, he says, “if you take advantage of that every month, it’s effectively the same thing as the raise that the Chicagoland folks got.”

Galanis says he’d be in the office five days a week if he could, but recognizes workers have come to appreciate the “flexibility that our employees have earned.”

“We’re hoping Friday can be a flex day,” he says, where workers can take care of doctor’s appointments and other personal needs.

Leaders won’t be tracking attendance. “We’re adults here,” Galanis says, noting that workers who need to step out for personal matters like appointments should just let their manager know ahead of time.

Galanis is hopeful the move will re-energize creativity and speed at the company, and that staff see he’s accessible as a CEO. “Now they see me every day,” he says. “We’re walking around, we’re having lunch together. Some intern can come in and say, ‘Steven, why haven’t we ever done this before?’”

Ultimately, “what we’re really trying to do is maximize the amount of in-person time that our team is getting with each other, and to make sure that we’re able to move at the speed of pop culture,” Galanis says.

Toy and gaming giant Hasbro took an optimistic tone Thursday on the potential effect of Chinese tariffs on its business, as executives said the company is shifting manufacturing away from China.

Hasbro Chief Financial Officer Gina Goetter said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that the toymaker’s 2025 guidance — which includes adjusted EBITDA of $1.1 billion to $1.15 billion, compared with $1.06 billion in 2024 — reflects the anticipated effect of U.S. tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada. It also reflects “mitigating actions we plan to take, including leveraging the strength of our supply chain and potential pricing,” the company said in a news release.

Rival toymaker Mattel previously said it could increase the prices of toys such as Hot Wheels and Barbie in response to tariffs. President Donald Trump imposed 10% tariffs on China in early February and is set to add 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada in March after pausing their initial implementation for 30 days.

Hasbro is on track to cut the volume of U.S. toys and games that originate from China from 50% to less than 40% over the next two years, Goetter said. Hasbro does not source from Canada and has “minimal” imports from Mexico, she said.

“Really, it’s a China story for us,” Goetter said.

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said on the call that even when accounting for tariffs, the toymaker expects “flattish” performance from the broader industry this year, with trading cards and building blocks leading the way. The company’s licensing business, he added, is one of its biggest margin drivers and will not be affected much by tariffs.

“It’s relatively [unexposed] to some of the tariff drama that’s going on right now,” Cocks said.

Hasbro also on Thursday announced a licensing collaboration with Mattel to create Play-Doh versions of Mattel’s Barbie dolls.

“Play-Doh Barbie allows children to unlock their inner fashion designer, creating Play-Doh fashions with amazing ruffles, bows and realistic fabric textures, all made with every kid’s favorite dough for a never-before-seen creativity experience,” Cocks said.

Shares of Hasbro gained roughly 10% in morning trading Thursday.

Here’s how Hasbro performed in the fourth quarter compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Earnings per share: 46 cents adjusted vs. 34 cents expected

Revenue: $1.1 billion vs. $1.03 billion expected

Fourth-quarter revenue fell 15% from $1.29 billion during the same quarter in 2023. Full-year 2024 revenue came in at $4.14 billion, down 17% from $5 billion in 2023.

The company partially attributed the numbers to its divestiture from its eOne film and TV business, which it sold to Lionsgate in December 2023. When excluding the divestiture, the company said, full-year revenue declined 7%.

Hasbro’s digital and licensed gaming revenue increased 35% to $132 million in the fourth quarter compared to the same period in 2023. For full-year 2024, Hasbro’s digital and licensed gaming revenue increased 22% to $471.7 million. Mobile game Monopoly Go! contributed $112 million in 2024 revenue.

Hasbro reported a net loss for the fourth quarter of $26.5 million, or a loss of 25 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $1.06 billion, or a loss of $7.64 per share, during the fourth quarter of 2023.

Adjusting for costs associated with restructuring and the eOne divestiture, among other one-time items, Hasbro reported fourth-quarter earnings of 46 cents per share, topping Wall Street expectations.

Airbus could prioritize deliveries to its non-U.S. customers if tariffs disrupt the European plane maker’s imports stateside, CEO Guillaume Faury said Thursday.

“We have a large demand from the rest of the world, so [if] we face very significant difficulties to deliver to the U.S., we can also adapt by bringing forward deliveries to other customers which are very eager to get planes,” Faury told CNBC’s Charlotte Reed, in an interview discussing the company’s full-year results.

“Those tariffs are looming, and we don’t know what they will be, [and], if and when we would have tariffs come in, what they would impact. So we stand ready to adapt accordingly,” Faury said, referring to U.S. President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging tariff threats which have already been ramped up against China.

Faury nevertheless stressed that Airbus had made moves in recent years to not only buy more from the U.S. and sell a significant number of aircraft and helicopters in the U.S., but also to base part of its production locally.

That includes a large output site in Mobile, Alabama, with two final assembly lines for the company’s A220 and A320 family jets, with another U.S. line under construction to build A320 and A321s for the domestic market.

A host of large U.S. carriers are Airbus customers, including American Airlines, Delta, United and JetBlue.

“So we have a lot of potential flexibilities,” Faury said regarding the potential imposition of duties, whose details remain uncertain.

“Bottom lime, we believe in this industry — that is very much a North Atlantic ecosystem with a lot of interdependencies — tariffs would hurt both sides. So I hope, I believe, we will not be significantly impacted by tariffs,” Faury said.

The European plane maker’s target for around 820 aircraft deliveries in 2025 was issued “in spite of those uncertainties, to clarify what we think we can deliver this year absent tariffs,” Faury said.

Airbus, meanwhile, remains stymied by a host of supply chain issues which are limiting its ability to ramp up production and work through its order backlog of more than 8,000 jets, Faury told CNBC.

His comments come after the company earlier on Thursday reported a 6% rise in annual revenue, but an 8% fall in adjusted operating profit to 5.35 billion euros ($5.59 billion) across 2024.

Profit at the company’s defense and space unit swung to a loss of 656 million euros for the full year.

Faury told CNBC that space was the “area where we are suffering,” amid competition from players such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and past investment in technologies that had proven difficult.

“We underestimated the risk compared to the reality,” Faury said, adding that the company was restructuring the unit and working to solve existing issues.

Despite challenges, Airbus’s annual results served to highlight its strength over its crisis-hit U.S. rival Boeing, which reported an annual loss of $11.83 billion for 2024.

In an attempt to court younger audiences, Disney’s ESPN is planning to add some user-generated content to its yet-to-be-named flagship streaming service, which will debut later this year.

While the details are still unclear, ESPN will allow subscribers to post their own content at some point in the application’s evolution, according to people familiar with the matter. The technology likely won’t be available at launch, which the company hopes will occur before the National Football League season begins in September. An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment.

Disney executives have also considered adding user-generated content to Disney+ and discuss YouTube’s influence on streaming on a near daily basis, CNBC reported last year.

Alphabet’s YouTube, which leans heavily on creator-led content, is the most popular streaming service with an 11.1% share of total TV usage in the U.S., according to Nielsen.

ESPN executives are targeting a price of either $25 per month or $30 per month for the ESPN streaming service, which will include all of ESPN’s linear programming plus other digital add-ons, the people said.

The company plans to announce a name for the service, a price and a launch date in the coming months, the people said.

Media and professional sports league executives are focusing on how to capture the attention of younger viewers that are opting to watch YouTube or TikTok over live games. ESPN spends tens of billions of dollars each year on the media rights for live sports.

Walmart would likely see some impact from tariffs President Donald Trump is seeking to impose, especially if ones threatened against Canada and Mexico are implemented, the retailer said Thursday.

The big-box giant reported quarterly earnings and also signaled slowing profit growth. Its shares fell about 6% amid a broader market decline Thursday morning.

In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said that while some two-thirds of Walmart’s products are sourced from the U.S., the company was “not going to be completely immune” from trade duties.

“We’ve lived in a tariff environment for the last seven or eight years, and we’ll do what we know how to do,” he said. “We’ll work with suppliers. We’ll lean into our private brand. We’ll shift supply where necessary to try to take advantage of lower costs that we can then pass on to consumers.”

Since Walmart is not sure if the tariffs will take effect next month, the company did not factor them into its guidance, Rainey said.

While a given company must pay a tariff up front if it imports a good from an affected country, the firm is ultimately forced to decide how to mitigate on those costs — and they often get passed down to shoppers.

Rainey previously told CNBC that there would likely be cases where prices for consumers would increase as a result of tariffs, adding that they are ‘inflationary’ for customers.

U.S. companies are seeing mounting queries about how they would be impacted by the levies Trump has called for. So far, only a supplemental 10% duty on Chinese goods has gone into effect, though the president has threatened a vast new array of tariffs depending on a given country’s current trade posture with the U.S. Steel and aluminum tariffs are set to kick in next month, while Trump this week called for new tariffs on automobiles, drugs, semiconductors and lumber imported to the U.S.

CNBC has found the word ‘tariffs’ has come up on more than 190 calls held by S&P 500 companies in 2025, putting it on track to see the highest share in half a decade. However, many, like Walmart, stated they were not yet figuring the effect of them into their official forward guidance and outlooks.

“We’ve game-planned out several scenarios and steps we could take depending on what actually goes into effect,” R. Scott Herren, the chief financial officer at the tech group Cisco, said in recent comments.

This week, the Federal Reserve indicated that discussion of tariffs had come up during its policy meetings, and had gone into its calculation for keeping interest rates elevated.

‘Business contacts in a number of Districts had indicated that firms would attempt to pass on to consumers higher input costs arising from potential tariffs,’ the central bank reported — something that could threaten to accelerate inflation.

And in its “upside risks to the inflation outlook,’ it cited ‘the possible effects of potential changes in trade and immigration policy.“

Walmart is known for its low prices and no frills approach.

So it may come as a surprise that wealthier shoppers are helping to fuel the retailer’s growth.

For more than two years, the discounter has noticed more customers with six-figure incomes shopping on its website and in its stores. Households earning more than $100,000 made up 75% of the company’s market share gains in the fiscal third quarter, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said on the company’s earnings call in November.

Those newer and more frequent customers have helped support the company’s aspirations to sell more higher-margin items, such as clothing and home goods. They are driving Walmart’s e-commerce sales, which have grown by double digits for 10 consecutive quarters. And they can boost the retailer’s newer revenue streams, such as subscription-based membership program Walmart+ and its advertising business Walmart Connect.

As Walmart reports its latest earnings on Thursday, Wall Street will be watching whether those upper-income customers are sticking around, after market share gains helped the retailer’s shares soar about 83% in the last year. Yet some investors have questioned whether Walmart’s traction with affluent shoppers has staying power, especially if the sticker shock of inflation cools.

In an interview with CNBC, Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner acknowledged that the retailer has gained and then lost upper-income customers before, such as in 2008 and 2009 during the Great Recession. Affluent shoppers stretched their dollars at the big-box retailer, but then ultimately returned to competitors.

This time, Furner said the gains will last because Walmart can save shoppers both time and money with e-commerce options.

“It’s different because we deliver to you at the curb [of the store],” he said in the late January interview. “We deliver to your house. We deliver your refrigerator. That whole Supercenter, which is an amazing retail format, is available in an hour or two for a large part of the country and growing really quickly.

Walmart’s expanding digital services have helped convince higher-income shoppers to give it a shot, said Brad Thomas, a retail analyst and managing director at KeyBanc Capital Markets. Some of those newer or more frequent customers have joined Walmart+, a subscription-based membership program that includes perks like free home deliveries. Walmart+, which launched about five years ago, is Walmart’s answer to Amazon Prime.

Walmart has not disclosed the program’s membership count, but it has reported double-digit membership income growth in each of the past four quarters..

Thomas said e-commerce options wipe out a potential hurdle for affluent shoppers: a potential stigma about shopping at the big-box stores themselves.

“There’s a customer in America that doesn’t think of itself as a Walmart shopper,” he said. “They think of themselves as a Target shopper or a Publix or a Whole Foods shopper and through the app and through the delivery capabilities, they can remain a non-Walmart core shopper, but get all the benefits of getting the branded items at Walmart prices.”

As inflation forced shoppers of all incomes to hunt for deals, some wealthier consumers realized they can get the same national brands like Tide detergent or Bounty paper towels from Walmart cheaper and often faster than at Amazon because of Walmart’s nearby stores, he said.

Walmart’s website and app have increased their selection, too, as the company has bulked up its third-party marketplace. Starting this summer, the company began offering premium beauty brands through its website, including hairdryers from T3 and perfumes from Victoria’s Secret.

Shoppers can now find handbags from Chanel and Louis Vuitton, too. Last month, Walmart announced a deal with resale platform Rebag, which sells the items through Walmart’s marketplace.

Yet as Walmart tries to keep those customers, it wants to encourage them to shop in person, as well. Walmart has stepped up investments in its stores to freshen its look and counter negative perceptions that higher-income shoppers might have.

Walmart has sped up the pace of remodels for its more than 4,600 stores across the U.S., with plans to revamp about 650 locations per year, an acceleration from a prior cadence of 450 to 500 per year, said Hunter Hart, senior vice president of Walmart Realty.

Remodeled stores have brighter lighting, wider aisles and mannequins, said Alvis Washington, Walmart’s vice president of retail brand experience. The stores also feature Walmart’s newer and more fashion-forward brands like Scoop and Free Assembly, and national brands that shoppers would recognize, such as Reebok.

The discounter launched a new grocery brand, BetterGoods, last year with colorful packaging and creative flavors that looks similar to merchandise that shoppers might find at Trader Joe’s or Target.

The Walmart U.S. CEO Furner said some of those changes have drawn upper-income customers to the company’s stores and app.

He said Walmart’s market share gains with affluent shoppers have come from online and in-store shopping, but added curbside pickup orders showed early signs of popularity with those customers. Even before the pandemic, Walmart saw that people who shopped with curbside pickup bought more higher-priced items, such as prime beef and seafood, Furner added.

He said that still rings true: Walmart sees more premium items in the shopping baskets of customers who buy online, get home deliveries or use curbside pickup.

Washington said Walmart treaded carefully with its store redesign, realizing it could risk its reputation for low prices and resonance with core customers, who typically have lower incomes. It promoted newer brands, but mixed in familiar staples, such as folded piles of inexpensive bath towels and denim.

“Having a great, elevated experience and great value aren’t mutually exclusive,” Walmart’s Washington said, recounting the company’s approach. “So when we looked at this, it’s like, how do we do both and make sure we can gain new customers and maintain the customers that we have?

When comparing remodeled stores to the rest of the fleet, Washington said higher comparable store sales reflect that customers like the different look. Walmart declined to provide specific numbers, saying it won’t release sales numbers until it reports fourth-quarter earnings.

Walmart’s customer mix for its U.S. e-commerce business hasn’t changed, even as it attracts higher-income shoppers, according to an analysis by market research firm Euromonitor. About 34% of Walmart’s online customers in the U.S. last year had incomes of $100,000 and above, which is roughly flat compared to two years prior.

Michelle Evans, global lead for retail and digital shopper insights at Euromonitor, said that indicates that Walmart is also gaining market share from lower- and middle-income customers.

Walmart still has a smaller share of higher-income shoppers than some key rivals: 49% and 48% of online U.S. shoppers at Target and Amazon, respectively, have incomes above $100,000.

Amazon remains a formidable competitor, especially when it comes to wealthier shoppers and general merchandise categories, Evans said. But Walmart’s biggest edge is its grocery department.

One of Walmart’s newer, higher-income shoppers is Francesca Frink. The 30-year-old lives in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Ill. with her husband, Sam, 1-year-old son and their English setter. The Frink family’s combined annual household income is over $200,000.

Last fall, Francesca Frink signed up for Walmart+ after her mother-in-law ordered a stroller from Walmart’s website and got it dropped at her door three hours later.

Initially, she said she hesitated to order fresh foods from Walmart. She bought packaged items like pasta and flour. Yet over time, the couple began ordering a larger portion of groceries, dog treats and even clothes for their son from Walmart.

The Frinks have stopped going to their old grocery store, Kroger-owned supermarket Mariano’s. They estimate that their weekly grocery bill is about 20% cheaper.

Previously, the couple said they avoided Walmart because their nearest store is outdated. Yet Sam Frink said the game has changed with curbside pickup and home deliveries.

“You don’t have to go in,” he said. “That’s the biggest thing.”

Francesca Frink said home deliveries from Walmart, included in their Walmart+ membership, save the couple time while they juggle two careers, a toddler and a dog. Plus, she said she found that Walmart had the grocery items she wanted and even those she didn’t expect, including organic blueberries, natural peanut butter and specialty mushroom ravioli.

Still, Francesca Frink said she still faces some apprehension from friends and family about buying groceries from Walmart.

But she said they’ve been surprised when they’ve tried and liked food items from Walmart.

In her day job, Euromonitor’s Evans tracked Walmart’s digital gains with higher-income shoppers. Yet she also saw it firsthand in her household.

Her husband signed the family up for Walmart+. During the holiday season, he told her all of his Christmas purchases would be coming from the discounter.

“He made a comment that all the gifts were coming from Walmart, and obviously that comes with a certain impression,” she said.

So she was surprised when she opened his gift and discovered it was a Michael Kors tote.