>To be fair, they’ve been paying ~ 2% dividend yield that whole time.
If you check the total return price, they're actually doing better than the s&p 500.
total return for walmart: 223% (https://ycharts.com/companies/WMT/total_return_price)
total return for S&P 500: 221% (https://ycharts.com/companies/SPY/total_return_price)