Home Depot Already Told Walmart Suppliers What To Listen For On Thursday. The Phrase Was “Up To A Certain Point.”

Home Depot reported first-quarter fiscal 2026 results before the market opened on Tuesday, beating Wall Street’s adjusted EPS estimate at $3.43 against $3.41 expected, with revenue of $41.8 billion on comparable sales growth of 0.6%. The company reaffirmed its full-year guidance of 2.5% to 4.5% total sales growth and flat-to-2% comparable sales growth. In a CNBC interview after the print, Chief Financial Officer Richard McPhail described the company’s core homeowner shopper as “engaged up to a certain point” before noting that customers continue to defer spend on larger projects. The deferred categories he named to Yahoo Finance were specific: lumber, building materials, millwork, flooring, and lighting. Paint and patio held up.

That language landed about seventy-two hours before John Furner’s first Q1 earnings call as Walmart’s CEO. The Home Depot read is not a Walmart read. The customer mix differs, the category mix differs, and Walmart’s grocery weighting gives it cyclical attributes Home Depot does not have. But the Tuesday morning transcript is the freshest available signal on how the U.S. consumer is behaving in real time, from a CFO on the record, with specific deferred categories named. For suppliers running cost-change and joint business planning conversations in the weeks after Thursday’s call, the Home Depot framing is the cleanest reference point available.

Two other data points landed in the same window, and both of them tighten the supplier-side reading further. Walmart guided Q1 FY27 net sales growth of 3.5% to 4.5% on the February Q4 earnings call. Wall Street consensus for Thursday sits at $174.07 billion in revenue and $0.65 in EPS, per Zacks, which represents year-over-year changes of +5.1% and +6.6% respectively. The consensus and the guidance were set under the prior macro framing, before the Persian Gulf energy shock fully developed.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released April Consumer Price Index data on May 12, reporting that the all-items index rose 3.8% over the prior twelve months, the highest annual reading since May 2023. The energy index rose 17.9% on the same twelve-month basis and accounted for more than forty percent of the monthly all-items increase. The same release showed real average hourly earnings fell 0.3% annually, the first time inflation has outpaced wage growth in three years. CNN reported the figures within hours, framing the wage crossover as the structural threshold most relevant to consumer behavior. For a supplier audience, the threshold matters operationally rather than economically. Trade-down accelerates when wages stop covering grocery costs. Private-brand penetration rises. Branded suppliers’ alternative-channel leverage weakens at exactly the same moment.

The third data point is sector-level rather than firm-level. Zacks reported on Monday that Wall Street has already cut Q2 earnings estimates for the Consumer Staples and Consumer Discretionary sectors since the quarter began, in response to the Persian Gulf conflict. Estimates for Energy and Basic Materials moved in the opposite direction over the same period. The branded suppliers selling into Walmart’s center store sit in Consumer Staples; the general merchandise suppliers sit in Consumer Discretionary. Both sectors entered Q2 with lower Wall Street earnings expectations than they had ninety days ago, and that adjustment was made before Furner has said a word. Whirlpool gave the same vector a name on May 7, describing the Iran war as causing a “recession-level industry decline” in its category.

What To Listen For In Furner’s Prepared Remarks

Furner has already given the supplier audience a preview of where his rhetorical emphasis will sit. In his first letter to shareholders, released with the April 23 annual report, he framed the current moment as “a pivotal moment, not just for our company, but for the industry,” with artificial intelligence reshaping how customers shop and how associates work. The letter described Walmart’s approach as “people-led, tech-powered.” That framing is the baseline. The Thursday call is partly an exercise in whether the Q1 numbers confirm the emphasis, complicate it, or force Furner to layer a more defensive consumer narrative on top of it.

Four specific pieces of language are worth tracking on Thursday, because each one will calibrate the supplier-side conversations that follow it.

The first is beef inflation language. Walmart CFO John David Rainey named beef as the inflation pocket likely to outlast the others on the Q3 FY26 earnings call in November. The Q4 FY26 call in February confirmed the pattern, with grocery like-for-like inflation easing to 0.6% on deflation in eggs and dairy while beef remained elevated. Whether Furner extends, compresses, or recasts that framing is the first signal Walmart protein suppliers and adjacent prepared-foods suppliers should listen for. Tyson Foods reported on May 4 that beef volumes fell 13.1% in its fiscal second quarter against an 11.5% average price increase, and the company reaffirmed its full-year fiscal 2026 adjusted Beef segment operating loss guidance of $350 million to $500 million. The trade-down is measurable at the wholesale level. Furner’s framing of how it is showing up at retail is the operational input for the next protein-category line review.

The second is grocery like-for-like inflation. The Q4 FY26 print of 0.6% was approximately seventy basis points below Q3. Directional change in that number signals whether the deflationary pull from eggs and dairy is continuing, stabilizing, or reversing under the energy-shock pressure. Suppliers in adjacent categories should compare the Q1 FY27 figure to both Q4 and Q3 rather than to consensus.

The third is general merchandise inflation. Rainey told analysts on the Q4 FY26 call that tariff-related costs lifted prices across many categories, and that general merchandise inflation rose more than 3% in Q4, up from 1.7% between July and September of fiscal 2026. The framing assumed a tariff-pass-through vector. The current vector is an energy shock layered on top of that residual tariff pressure, and energy moves through the cost-of-goods stack faster than tariffs do. Whether Furner treats the two as a single inflation story or separates them will signal how Walmart is modeling Q2 input costs for its supplier base.

The fourth is higher-income shopper acquisition. Zacks identifies Walmart’s consistent share gain among higher-income households as a structural advantage that has offset affordability-based softness in the lower-income cohort. The company’s value orientation, grocery weighting, and digital capabilities are the named drivers. How Furner characterizes Q1 momentum in that cohort, and whether the framing extends to e-commerce and Walmart Connect specifically, will signal where the supplier-side investment conversation goes for the remainder of fiscal 2027.

The 1P And 3P Reads Diverge On The Same Call

For 1P branded suppliers, the listening priorities are the inflation-pocket and like-for-like grocery numbers, the private-brand language (Walmart committed in October 2025 to remove artificial dyes and thirty other ingredients from its private brands by January 2027, working with private brand suppliers on reformulation), and any framing of general merchandise tariff-versus-energy cost separation. The substantive supplier-side conversations in the weeks after the call will be calibrated against that specific language.

For 3P Marketplace sellers, the listening priorities are different. Walmart Connect U.S. ad revenue grew 41% year over year in Q4 FY26, and global ad revenue grew 46% for the full fiscal year, reaching nearly $6.4 billion. Global e-commerce sales grew 24% in Q4 FY26, with Marketplace as the primary driver. Advertising and membership accounted for one-third of Walmart’s Q4 operating income. In a Q2 environment where the broader retail-sector margin picture is pressured and Wall Street has already cut Consumer Discretionary earnings estimates, Walmart has strong incentive to lean into the higher-margin advertising and Marketplace segments on Thursday. Sellers should listen for Connect growth rates, Marketplace contribution to e-commerce, non-endemic advertiser commentary, and any language around the agentic shopping assistant Sparky’s effect on order values, which Walmart U.S. CEO Dave Guggina described as a 35% larger average order value for engaged shoppers on the Q4 call.

What Changes Operationally After Thursday

The most useful posture for a supplier between today and Thursday is to have the Home Depot transcript open while listening to Walmart. The single phrase to compare is McPhail’s “up to a certain point.” If Furner uses comparable language about the lower-income cohort, about big-ticket general merchandise, about discretionary trade-down, the cost-change and assortment conversations that follow the call will be calibrated to that specific framing. If he does not, and instead leans into the higher-income shopper acquisition story and the advertising and Marketplace momentum, the same conversations will be calibrated to a different framing entirely. Both versions are operationally distinct. Both are consistent with what Walmart has said over the prior two quarters. Which one Furner emphasizes is the input the supplier audience does not yet have.

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