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WalMart goes "back to basics"
Pandora:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will launch a promotional campaign next month called “It’s Back,” to tell core customers the discounter is restoring merchandise it removed from store shelves in a flubbed renovation effort.
--- Quote ---Starting in May, Wal-Mart shoppers in the U.S. will see signs in stores heralding the return of fishing tackle, bolts of fabric and other “heritage” merchandise that Wal-Mart reduced or cut out altogether as it attempted to spruce up its stores to appeal to more well-heeled shoppers.
That strategy failed, and the Bentonville, Ark., retail giant now is pursuing a back-to-basics strategy to reverse the company’s fortunes after seven consecutive quarters of sales declines at U.S. stores open at least a year.
“Some of these products were very important to our customers, particularly in rural areas, and they let us know they wanted them back,” said Duncan Mac Naughton, the former chief merchandising officer of Wal-Mart’s Canadian business, who was put in charge of U.S. merchandising in January. “We heard them, and they are going to notice a difference soon.”
In addition to bringing back a broader assortment in hopes of restoring Wal-Mart’s luster as a one-stop shopping destination, executives at the world’s largest retailer say they are pushing store managers and product buyers to step up price comparisons with neighboring retailers to ensure that Wal-Mart is offering lower prices.
Such checks of the competition were an obsession of the company’s late founder, Sam Walton, but have dropped off in recent years as Wal-Mart moved away from its focus on “every day low prices” and began promoting deals on some products while quietly raising prices on others.
--- End quote ---
Where they went wrong:
The failure, in large part, can be pinned to Leslie Dach: a well-known progressive and former senior aide to Vice President Al Gore.
--- Quote ---In July 2006, Dach was installed as the public relations chief for Wal-Mart. He drafted a number of other progressives into the company, seeking to change the company’s way of doing business: its culture, its politics, and most importantly its products.
Out went drab, {DRAB?! BECAUSE TO FRUGAL PEOPLE, COLOR AND STYLE ARE ESSENTIALLY FRIVOLOUS?! - P.} inexpensive merchandise so dear to low-income Americans. In came upscale organic foods, “green” products, trendy jeans, and political correctness. In other words, Dach sought to expose poor working Americans to the “good life” of the wealthy, environmentally conscious Prius driver.
Dach’s failure should be a cautionary tale for President Obama: last week he scolded a blue collar man in Pennsylvania for driving an SUV, and he has previously admonished Americans to get out of their gas-guzzlers and into electric cars. Dach’s failure should also put Michelle Obama on notice; she has been pushing her White House organic vegetable garden as a model for working Americans.
Like other real-world experiments, the Wal-Mart story exposes the failure of progressivism in the marketplace, as the Dach strategy has been a fiasco: the merchandising turned off low-income (and largely Democratic-leaning) customers. Says former Wal-Mart executive Jimmy Wright:
The basic Wal-Mart customer didn’t leave Wal-Mart. What happened is that Wal-Mart left the customer.
Dach convinced the company to steer away from founder Sam Walton’s core values. At the core of Dach’s campaign was to prove that Wal-Mart was “going green.” He brought in Vice President Gore to speak about environmental issues: they actually screened his global warming film, An Inconvenient Truth, at a quarterly meeting of Wal-Mart empl0yees and invited environmental groups. Expensive organic foods were showcased in their produce section. Trendy and pricey environmentally safe products were put on the shelves.
Richard Edelman of Edelman Public Relations — who had once hired Dach — noted that Dach constantly pushed Democratic Party health care and environmental agendas inside the giant company. Writes the New Yorker:
Richard Edelman suggested that he is seeing Dach’s influence on the company. Edelman called Dach an “idealist” who has carried to Wal-Mart his fervor for such traditional Democratic causes as universal health care and environmentalism.
The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope seemed pleased that Dach was inside the enemy camp, confiding to the New Yorker:
One of the remarkable things about the environmental movement is how rarely people from our side end up on the other side, and Leslie is on the other side.
But Dach’s fervor only sunk the company. Andy Barron, a Wal-Mart executive vice president, told an investor meeting:
Clearly, we’ve lost some of our focus on what I would call the core customer. … You might say, in short, that we were trying to be something that maybe we’re not.
George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley — the nation’s largest organics cooperative — said to the WSJ:
Is the Wal-Mart customer ready to embrace a full set of organics products? The answer is no, not yet.
This is probably not what Michelle Obama wants to hear.
For leading the failed experiment, Dach was awarded three million dollars in stock and a hundred and sixty-eight thousand stock options, in addition to an undisclosed base salary.
Summing up the mess, mechanic Mike Craig told the WSJ:
Wal-Mart just went and broke it.
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Good. I shopped WalMart for certain items -- the all-Arabica bean coffee for one -- and they've been disappeared from the shelves, so I'm looking forward to not being stuck with Tar-zhay only, since it views selling the large, outdoor garbage cans, for instance, as beneath its fashion-forward self.
IronDioPriest:
So where is this well-known (heretofore unknown to me) progressive Dach person now? Surely Walmart isn't allowing such an enemy to continue polluting their personnel roster?
radioman:
Going back to basics means that when I go to check out i will always be next in line!!
Pandora:
--- Quote from: IronDioPriest on April 13, 2011, 10:38:29 PM ---So where is this well-known (heretofore unknown to me) progressive Dach person now? Surely Walmart isn't allowing such an enemy to continue polluting their personnel roster?
--- End quote ---
Good question and, interestingly, not disclosed.
Dead, I hope. >:( ::saywhat::
IronDioPriest:
--- Quote from: Pandora on April 13, 2011, 10:46:31 PM ---
--- Quote from: IronDioPriest on April 13, 2011, 10:38:29 PM ---So where is this well-known (heretofore unknown to me) progressive Dach person now? Surely Walmart isn't allowing such an enemy to continue polluting their personnel roster?
--- End quote ---
Good question and, interestingly, not disclosed.
Dead, I hope. >:( ::saywhat::
--- End quote ---
Oh the horror. You must be some extremist Right-wing-ger.
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