I think building Amazon wasn't cheap too. Amazon made losses for most of two decades straight, so Walmart dumping massieve money into building a competitor, with the insights of today, might still be cheap, relatively.
All shopping is going to be online and delivered for the same price as going to a big warehouse store. With the dash buttons and the third party integration Amazon is too big to ignore.
Walmart being a established multi-national company they can't really have unprofitable divisions or unprofitable quarters. This will be equivalent to Yahoo's Tumblr acquisition (a failure).... no amount of heads exploding blue dust will save this.
I think building Amazon wasn't cheap too. Amazon made losses for most of two decades straight, so Walmart dumping massieve money into building a competitor, with the insights of today, might still be cheap, relatively.