they are looking for an "executive director", much probably they are looking ahead in crypto field and not just one centralized coin.
They are not looking for an executive director and certainly won't hire one without experience in their own company or one that applies to an ad, they've searched for a product lead, meaning a person that is in charge of running a team that will either launch or prepares a product.
Unfortunately for me, it seems far likely it's one of their own creation, an addition to the already existing Walmart Credit and Money cards.
If they do plan on accepting cryptocurrency payments then I do not think it would take as long as you think. They would not need to test it or do limited roll outs. They could test it themselves but when it is working they do not need to touch it.
Nope, that's exactly what large companies do, they do a lot of testing, especially the ones that are having a lot of stores or cover multiple countries, it's nothing special to see many stores in a region to be beta testers of something. The perfect example was how scanning your own purchases and paying was rolled out by every company, Walmart launched it in a few stores and then decided
to retire it because of bad feedback from clients and low usage. They've spent billions, tested it for months in one hundred and so stores, and then abandoned it. Now they've moved to a new version, and are currently testing it in a few superstores but are still using employers to scan. On the other hand, they are testing cashier-less functions in some others.
People often don't realize how much testing is done, how many hours, and how much money is spent sometimes on products that will never be completed or dropped a few days before being introduced to the public.
They do not lose any thing by including crypto payments on their platforms.
Rush in with a product and don't thoughtfully test on your payment network, end with people blocking your customer's lines because their payment doesn't go through, have people pay you 5$ of
BTC, and when your system is batching payment you realize it's paying more than what is worth to use the dust received because your system fees are not well designed, implement a thrid solution that has never been tested at a large scale and piss of your customer as it never works?
How do you go about processing chargebacks, how are you offering refunds, who is issuing them, what department is in charge of calculating and sending those back,...do you seriously think such a large chain will simply hand the cashier a smartphone with electrum on it, and that's all, everything is ready to go?