Walmart confirmed Monday that a dedicated Beauty Expert role piloted at 22 stores starting in September 2025 will expand to 425 U.S. locations by the end of 2026. Per Retail Dive's reporting on the rollout, the new associates focus exclusively on the beauty aisle — skincare, cosmetics, hair — instead of holding the shared-floor responsibility every other Walmart associate carries. They earn between $14 and $35 an hour depending on market, get monthly and quarterly product training, and receive "Walmart Beauty Boxes" so they can test the products they recommend.
This is not just a labor experiment. It is the most pointed in-store strategy shift Walmart has made in beauty in years, and it lands precisely as Target's five-year shop-in-shop arrangement with Ulta winds down. Per the joint statement from Target and Ulta, the 600-plus Ulta Beauty at Target shops will close in August 2026 and the linked-rewards integration will end with them. That removes a curated prestige beauty experience from approximately 600 American big-box footprints — exactly the kind of customer Walmart's pilot is designed to capture.
The competitive arithmetic is easy to read. The Daily Inter Lake's coverage frames the move as Walmart "breaking its no-frills mold," and that's not hyperbole — Walmart has historically built its supercenters around self-service, with associates floating across categories. Putting a trained expert in front of the beauty wall is closer to a Sephora model than a Walmart one. Per Chain Store Age, the role is the in-store layer of Walmart's broader "Beauty 2.0" strategy, which includes relocating beauty departments to the front of the store and rebuilding the planogram around boutique-style fixtures.
The pay band tells you who Walmart is trying to recruit. $35 an hour at the top of the range is meaningfully above the Walmart store average, and it's structured for cosmetic counter veterans — Sephora cast members, Ulta Beauty Advisors, department-store beauty associates. Walmart is, in effect, offering a stable hourly home with healthcare and tuition benefits to a labor pool that has spent the last decade churning between specialty and department stores. Inc. magazine's coverage calls these "high-spending shoppers," and the wage move is consistent with a company chasing them.
What the wins look like for Walmart, beyond a one-time bump from Ulta-orphaned customers: prestige-beauty basket sizes are typically 2-3x the average Walmart basket, the category's gross margin is well above the company average, and beauty drives multi-trip frequency in a way that diapers and groceries do not. Walmart's beauty business has grown through partnerships with Estée Lauder, Charlotte Tilbury, and Laneige over the last 18 months, and as we covered last week with Amazon's Summer Beauty Event going prestige-grade, the channel walls between mass and prestige are coming down across retail.
The risk is execution. Sephora and Ulta have spent decades training the customer to expect a knowledgeable consultative experience, and a six-month onboarding curriculum at Walmart cannot replicate that overnight. The 22-store pilot is small, and the leap to 425 stores by December — a 19x scale-up in nine months — is the part of the announcement Wall Street will be testing in Q3 comps. There's also the wage equity question internally: a Walmart beauty associate at $35 an hour stands inside the same store as a deli associate at $17. That gap creates retention churn in the rest of the box if it isn't carefully managed.
Target had every reason to keep Ulta. The break-up was a competitive concession to a shop-in-shop model that wasn't generating the differentiated traffic both partners needed, especially as Sephora's Kohl's expansion and Amazon's prestige push ate at the same audience. Walmart, watching all of that, has decided to pour resources into the in-store beauty experience exactly when its biggest mass-channel rival is pulling out. That's the kind of strategic timing that defines a category for the next five years — not a year.