Stephen Foley: Duke puts some showbiz into Wal-Mart

US Outlook Wal-Mart's annual shareholder meeting always feels more Grammys than grocers and, heavens, there was some star power on show yesterday. Mariah Carey, Enrique Iglesias and Mary J Blige were all on stage, and the whole shindig was hosted by a wise-cracking Jamie Foxx.

The company, the owner of Asda in the UK, uses the event as a pep rally for staff, who are bussed in in their thousands to an Arkansas basketball stadium, which is how they rationalise the extravagance at a company more famous for pinching pennies from the wages and healthcare benefits of its employees.

This was the second event under chief executive Mike Duke, who looks like he might be able achieve what his predecessor, Lee Scott, failed to do, which is to make Wal-Mart's ultra-low price model appealing to consumers who fancy themselves a cut above its core low-income shopper.

Under Mr Scott, the company tried a bewildering combination of upmarket clothing lines advertised in Vogue right alongside aisles piled high with cheap and cheerful homewares. Happily, the experiment is long past, and Mr Duke seems to have found a new way to square the circle in its mature markets.

The answer he has found is a surprising one: to hear executives talk these days, you might be forgiven for thinking the world's largest big box retailer is a tech company.

Buried in the sort of jargon that would make founder Sam Walton turn in his grave ("We need to really churn the productivity loop," he said – really), Mr Duke sees retail headed into a whole new era of price transparency.

Independent price comparison websites are just the start of something much bigger, and Wal-Mart has been trumpeting to analysts how it is building its own technology tools to help consumers see where it beats its rivals on the prices of brand name goods. Expect new tools to be integrated with social networking and online advertising.

Tech savvy internet users are not Wal-Mart's core constituency - and that's the best news of all. Wall Street has been fretting that customers who have traded down to Wal-Mart during the recession will desert as times improve, but they might soon be singing a different tune.