Walmart put a price on its challenge to Amazon and Costco this week: $120 a year. On Tuesday the retailer launched a Walmart membership bundle that folds Walmart+ and Sam’s Club Plus into a single subscription, according to Reuters. The timing is deliberate. The offer lands just before the holiday shopping season, in a year when Walmart’s own sales growth has slowed to its weakest pace in six years.

The mechanics are simple. Shoppers pay $120 annually for both tiers, a structure Business Insider reports means existing Sam’s Club Plus members effectively receive Walmart+ at no extra charge, while Walmart+ members can add the premium club membership for an additional $22.

What Is Confirmed Inside The Walmart Membership Bundle

Three elements are confirmed by the company: the $120 annual price, the pairing of the two Plus tiers, and the delivery promise attached to both. Walmart says Plus orders fulfilled from stores and clubs arrive in as little as 30 minutes, with some orders delivered in under 10 minutes.

That delivery speed is the actual product. Streaming entertainment, pharmacy services and partner deals are supporting perks, but the operational claim — that a store or club can function as a same-hour distribution node — is what Walmart is selling.

Walmart does not disclose membership counts or fee revenue. Every figure describing the size of these programs is an outside estimate, and should be labelled as such.

Furner’s Fee Comparison Is Framing, Not A Like-For-Like Price

CEO John Furner did not name competitors in his statement, but the reference was not subtle. “Consider what people may be paying today: $139 for a retail membership with delivery. $130 for a warehouse club,” he said. Business Insider identified those figures as the fees charged by Amazon and Costco respectively.

Two cautions apply. First, a fee comparison is not a value comparison; the $139 and $130 buy bundles of benefits that differ from Walmart’s. Second, the standalone Sam’s Club Plus fee is not stated in the published material, which makes the savings claim difficult to check independently. Reuters describes the bundle as offering a discount of nearly $100 versus buying the subscriptions separately, while Walmart’s own framing compares its $120 against rival fees of $139 and $130. Those are different arithmetic exercises, and readers should not treat them as interchangeable.

The one number that requires no estimate is the price: $120 for both.

Walmart Attacks From A Slowing Base

The context matters more than the press release. Reuters reports Walmart enters the holiday season amid weak consumer spending, particularly among lower- and middle-income households, and that Walmart, Target and Kroger have cut prices on thousands of items this year to attract budget-conscious shoppers.

Walmart reported its slowest quarterly comparable sales growth in six years in August, with average spend per visit also softening year over year. Costco and discount grocers such as Aldi have drawn stronger US traffic as shoppers hunt for convenience and value.

A separate Yahoo Finance report puts the second-quarter US same-store sales growth at 2.6%, the weakest since the fourth quarter of 2020, with grocery still the majority of US sales and private-label share up 1.3 percentage points year over year.

The scale gap is stark. Mizuho estimates roughly 25 million Walmart+ members and 30 million Sam’s Club members, with about 10% overlap between the two. Globally, Costco reported more than 150 million membership cardholders, and Amazon is estimated to hold more than 220 million Prime members. On those estimates, the $22 add-on targets a relatively narrow band of existing Walmart+ shoppers — which suggests the bundle is as much about retention and basket size as about recruiting new members.

Mizuho analyst David Bellinger framed it that way in a note: “The bundled offering screens as another signal of WMT pushing more value into its overall ecosystem, and highlighting its rapid delivery capabilities.”

Why African Retailers Should Watch The Fees, Not Copy The Model

The published reporting contains no detail on international availability. Both sources describe a US holiday season, US traffic patterns and US fee levels. No market outside the United States is named, and no non-US pricing is disclosed.

That absence is the relevant fact for readers in Africa and other regions. The 30-minute delivery claim depends on dense store and club networks plus last-mile capacity — infrastructure conditions that vary enormously by market. A $120 membership bundle built on that base is not a portable template; it is a US-specific play.

What travels is the pricing signal. Walmart, Target and Kroger cutting prices on thousands of items is evidence of a defensive posture in a soft spending environment. Suppliers and exporters who track US retail demand should read the bundle as a margin story rather than a growth story.

What To Watch Before The Holidays

Whether Walmart breaks its silence on membership counts. Whether Amazon or Costco adjust fees or bundle their own tiers in response. And whether the holiday quarter’s comparable sales figures show the bundle moving baskets or merely protecting existing ones. None of those outcomes is confirmed yet; all three are open questions.

The Big Picture

The Walmart membership bundle is best understood as a fee war dressed as a discount. Membership fees are recurring, high-margin revenue that funds delivery capacity, and Walmart is using its two-tier structure to compete on price against rivals whose combined scale it does not match. Furner’s statement sets the terms of that contest on Walmart’s chosen ground: the annual fee. Whether the $120 bundle changes shopping behaviour, or simply re-prices loyalty Walmart already had, will only become clear in the quarterly numbers that follow the holiday season.

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Skechers and Kizik both claimed victory this week after judges at the Unified Patent Court in Munich ruled that a narrow set of Skechers step-in shoes infringes a patent owned by Kizik’s parent company, and ordered Skechers to stop making, distributing and selling those styles in 18 European countries.

The ruling was issued on Oct. 17 and confirmed through company statements over the following days. The Skechers Kizik patent dispute began in 2025, when Fast IP, LLC, the intellectual property holding company of HandsFree Labs, filed at the Munich court against Skechers’ Hands Free Slip-Ins range. The complaint also named Skechers’ German, Swiss, Belgian, Italian and French operations.

Hands-free footwear has become an increasingly important category for Skechers since the company introduced Slip-ins in December 2021. Skechers describes itself as the third-largest footwear company in the world. Kizik sells on the same premise: a shoe that goes on without hands.

What The Munich Court Actually Ordered

The panel did not hand Kizik everything it asked for. According to a copy of the decision reviewed by Footwear News, the injunction covers only sneakers built with a specific design combining elastic side panels and a heel stabilizer. Claims against certain other Skechers styles named in the original complaint were rejected.

The order binds Skechers across the 18 EU states participating in the court’s system: Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Finland, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Sweden. Damages were also awarded. Either side can appeal.

When the case was filed in August 2025, the disputed amount carried a preliminary estimate of about 1 million euros, with 200,000 euros in provisional damages requested, according to FashionUnited. Set against Skechers’ $9.42 billion sale to 3G Capital, the money is minor. The injunction is the prize.

Why Both Sides Read The Skechers Kizik Patent Dispute As A Win

Both readings have support in the ruling, which is why the two statements do not contradict each other so much as describe different halves of the same document.

Gareth Hosford, chief executive of HandsFree Labs and Kizik, said the outcome “shows that the system works,” adding: “We’re pleased the court recognized the strength of our patent, and we’ll keep defending the technology our team built.

Skechers, in its own statement, counted the styles. “Skechers won on three of the four styles, with the fourth being a minor and commercially insignificant style for Skechers,” the company said in a release carried by Business Wire. It also quoted the court’s language that Kizik’s infringement claims were “largely unfounded.”

Both claims can hold at once. A finding of infringement on one commercially small style is still a finding of infringement, and it still carries a sales ban in the bloc. A rejection on three is still a rejection.

The Patent Counts Do Not Match

The two companies describe their patent portfolios in figures that have shifted over the life of the case. In July 2025, Skechers said it held more than 140 hands-free utility and design patents worldwide. By its October 2026 statement, that figure had become more than 300. HandsFree Labs, in the period when it filed, described holding more than 200 patents and applications worldwide.

Neither figure is independently verified in the material the companies released. The gap matters because Skechers has said it will “aggressively challenge both the validity of the patents and the infringement claims.” A validity fight turns on which specific claims survive review, not on portfolio totals cited in press releases.

What The Order Leaves Untouched

The injunction’s reach stops at the court’s participating states. Skechers says it sells in approximately 180 countries and territories through department and specialty stores, its website and more than 5,300 own retail stores. The banned styles can still be made and sold outside the 18-state bloc, subject to whatever other courts decide.

The complaint named Skechers’ Swiss arm, and Switzerland is not among the 18 states covered by the judgment. The enforcement map is drawn by treaty membership, not by where a company’s subsidiaries sit.

For buyers and distributors in Africa, Asia and Latin America, nothing in the Munich order changes the availability of the affected styles. What changes is European inventory. Kizik’s original complaint sought a recall of product placed on the market since July 9, 2025; the companies’ statements on the judgment do not specify how the court treated that request.

The American Case Is Still Open

The European action was a follow-on. HandsFree Labs filed a US suit on July 24, 2025, in the federal district court for the Eastern District of Texas, and that litigation remains ongoing. Skechers has argued its footwear uses its own technology and that Kizik’s patents are invalid.

Skechers president Michael Greenberg said in 2025 that the timing of the claims followed the 3G Capital deal: “We believe that, after all these years of silence, the true motivation for this lawsuit might be found right on the face of Kizik’s complaint, where they state that they are looking for a share of the $9.42 billion being paid for Skechers, money Kizik did not earn and does not deserve.”

That is an allegation by Skechers, not a court finding. No judgment has addressed motive, and Kizik has not conceded the point in any statement reviewed here.

What To Watch

Three markers will show whether the Skechers Kizik patent dispute changes the hands-free market or only its paperwork. First, whether Skechers appeals the Munich order and seeks a stay of the injunction while an appeal runs. Second, how the Texas case treats patent validity, since a European finding does not bind a US court. Third, whether the ruling pulls other step-in sellers into the Unified Patent Court’s reach. The court’s 18-state jurisdiction is now a tested venue for footwear patents, and both companies have said they intend to keep enforcing and challenging.

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About Clare Dominic

Clare Dominic is the Editor at AfriLatest. With a background in journalism and a passion for storytelling, she oversees the editorial process to ensure content is accurate, engaging, and relevant. Clare works closely with contributors to maintain the highest standards of journalistic integrity across all news, sports, and lifestyle coverage.

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Selma Blair says she drank alcohol to mask symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a disclosure that arrives in the middle of a criminal case and a public dispute over what a medical emergency looks like to the people standing nearby.

The actor made the comments on a new episode of “The Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg Show.” According to TMZ, which first reported the interview, Blair said she had used alcohol since “a very young age” to soothe headaches, anxiety and nerve pain. She acknowledged she does not live a “sober sober lifestyle” and said drinking is something she “cannot do.”

Those are her words, in her framing. No medical records have been made public, and nothing in the available record independently verifies the account beyond Blair’s own telling.

How Selma Blair Described Her Drinking On The Podcast

The interview was recorded before the events that put her in handcuffs. McCarthy wrote on Instagram that the conversation predated “the recent events involving Selma Blair,” adding: “Nothing but love for Selma and this conversation.”

Blair’s description of self-medication is specific. She tied drinking to nerve pain, one of the harder symptoms associated with MS, and to anxiety and headaches. She also drew the line herself: she is not sober, and she knows alcohol is something she should not touch.

That admission does real work in the record. It is a first-person statement about a pattern, not a clinical finding, and it does not by itself explain what happened on a plane in October.

“Neither flight attendant has spoken publicly. Their names have not been released in the source material reviewed here. Their injuries — bite marks and a bloody nose, according to the pilot’s communication with air traffic control — are documented in the audio, but no independent medical record or account from them appears in the available reporting.”

The Arrest Timeline, Separated From The Allegations

The flight was a Delta service from Los Angeles to New York. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said Blair was accused of injuring two flight attendants, then kicking a police officer who was taking her to a hospital and kicking a nurse after she arrived.

She pleaded not guilty on Monday to two counts of assault on state charges involving the officer and the nurse, according to the Associated Press. A judge issued a protective order covering both. Blair is free on bail, and her next court date is in January.

The FBI also issued her a notice charging assault related to her actions aboard the aircraft, a federal law enforcement official told the AP on condition of anonymity. Air traffic communications recorded the Delta pilot asking the tower for medical personnel at the gate to treat bite marks and a bloody nose, while saying ambulances were not necessary.

That audio is evidence of injuries. It is not evidence of a diagnosis, and it does not settle intent.

What Her Representatives Say About The Medical Emergency

A statement released Friday by Blair’s representatives said she “experienced a medical emergency on the flight,” that “there was no attempt to open the door of the aircraft” and that she “did not intend to harm anyone.” It said her MS has been public since 2018 and that she also has pseudobulbar affect, described in the statement as a neurological condition secondary to her MS that “bears directly on how a medical episode presents to people who do not know her.”

The statement added that she travels with a service dog and that authorities took the dog from her.

Pseudobulbar affect involves uncontrolled laughing or crying and is documented as a complication of neurological disease. The statement is an assertion by her side, not a court finding. No medical documentation has been filed publicly in the case.

Why The 2016 Flight Keeps Returning To This Story

This is not the first time Blair has linked alcohol, medication and air travel. In 2016 she apologized for statements she made during a flight from Cancun to Los Angeles, saying she had mixed alcohol with medication and blacked out.

Friday’s statement complained that the public version of the recent events had been “built almost entirely on a police statement and a decade-old headline.” The statement did not name the headline. The 2016 episode is the only decade-old in-flight incident involving Blair in the public record, which makes the reference plain enough without being confirmed by her representatives.

The parallel cuts both ways. It supports her team’s argument that a pattern of alcohol and medication problems predates this case and shapes how it is read. It also gives reporters a documented prior incident to cite, which is precisely what the statement objects to.

What Is Confirmed, What Is Alleged, And What Is Absent

Confirmed: Selma Blair has MS, disclosed in 2018. She was charged, she pleaded not guilty, and she is due back in court in January. The podcast interview exists, with McCarthy’s disclaimer attached.

Alleged: that she injured two flight attendants. That account comes from the Port Authority, and the state charges filed so far involve the officer and the nurse, not the attendants.

Absent: medical records, the full incident report, and any judicial finding on what caused the episode. Also absent from the sourcing is any data on how MS is diagnosed and treated in African health systems, and nothing here should be read as a statement about that.

The Bigger Picture For Selma Blair And The MS Community

The story has two audiences, and they are reading different documents. One is following a criminal case with a January court date and a federal notice. The other is listening to a 54-year-old actor describe drinking to get through nerve pain, in an interview taped before any of it happened.

For the second group, the Selma Blair interview is a rare first-person account of self-medication inside chronic illness, delivered by someone who has been a public face of MS since 2018. For the first, her words are context, not exoneration, and her representatives’ statement is a legal argument rather than a medical record.

Both readings can be true at once, and the case will not resolve the question either way. Courts decide intent and injury. They do not decide what it is like to live with nerve pain, which is the part Blair was describing, and the part no docket will capture.

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About Rose Green

Rose Green is an entertainment and lifestyle author at AfriLatest. With a passion for storytelling, she contributes creative and thought-provoking content, capturing the imagination of readers. Rose specializes in entertainment news, celebrity updates, and lifestyle trends, sparking meaningful conversations across diverse topics.

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