Wal-Mart is going upscale in hopes of boosting their sagging sales figures:
Dear God, what if Wal-Mart sold Manolo Blahniks in the shoe section? Or stocked copies of Dwell and the New York Review of Books in the magazine aisle?
At Wal-Mart’s annual meeting last week, CEO Lee Scott unveiled what may be a subtle shift in just that direction. The company is doing fine selling goods in massive quantities to lower- and middle-income shoppers who patronize Wal-Mart because, in Scott’s words, they “have to save money.” But these customers can get tapped out. Indeed, the retailer’s same-store sales have been plodding along, increasing less than 3 percent per year.
To grow more rapidly, Scott said, Wal-Mart needs to attract customers with lots of discretionary income who shop where they want to. So Wal-Mart plans to appeal to them by improving the quality of its clothes and goods and by stocking more “organic and natural food.”
Tip: don’t put this fancy stuff under the same roof as the garbage cans, underwear, and lawnmowers; think Chipotle, the upscale Taco Bell. And good luck, kick Costco in the ass.
I’m not sure we can afford many more of Wall-Mart’s innovations:
Like this.
Or this.
Or this.
Wal-Mart ain’t getting my business, if I have any choice.
Their stuff is crap.
Even if they go upscale, their stuff will still be crap.
I can get a decent bottle of wine at Costco for substantially less than I’d pay at Fred Meyer. I can’t imagine going to Wal-Mart for wine.
The state liquor stores actually have decent values on wine, too.
Costco is a pretty good store for what it offers. You simply can’t get fresh shiitake mushrooms elsewhere for the price, and nobody who buys them will go to Wal-Mart to get them.
Wal-Mart would do better to actually improve its corporate image by giving its workers a livable wage, and being less petroleum dependent. But that would involve a total remake of their whole business strategy.
I agree Walmart sells crap, but so does Costco. Check out this Sharp TV set that both of them carry; Walmart’s price is better than Costco’s, who lies about the HDTV thing, but Sharp’s cut is probably the same.
Don’t you just hate the people who profit from Walmart’s exploitation of the workers?
I don’t do hate.
When cornered it’s best to surrender, John.
A nunber of my friends have joined me in shopping anywhere but WalMart. Personally, I was unable to stomach their treatment of a young woman I know, who had been required to ‘work off the clock’, meaning she had to put in time not paid for, if she was to get scheduled at all.
When I learned that over 70% of its employees qualify for medical care assistance on the basis of need, I was not surprised, but resent that my tax monies are supporting WalMart policies of under remuneration of workers.
It seems to me that most jobs at Wal-Mart are unskilled, so the people who have them are lucky to get any kind of a paycheck at all.