https://www.yahoo.com/style/walmart-closing-hundreds-stores-laying-140952700.html
So I read this on all the financial pages today, but I ask myself, what is to blame for this? In Ames Iowa, where I live most of the year, a town of maybe sixty thousand, we have a Walmart, a Super Walmart, and a Sam's Club. I mean, they have driven most of the rest of their competition out of business, and now they are driving themselves out of business. What else would one expect?
Walmart hasn't been doing that well for a while. They've struggled to obtain strong and focused leadership at the top, and in my opinion, they still don't have it.
For several years now, they've been focusing less on sound business decisions and more on chasing the latest dumb P.C. fad, whether it's pandering to the environmental activists, the First Lady's anti-fat campaign, or the $15/hr minimum wage.
They've been way, way behind on e-commerce and still don't do it well. They can't even deliver an accurate inventory status for products in their stores, and their web site's a mess, combining products that they sell along with affiliates.
The shopping experience at Walmart is generally miserable. I get that they can't control the "crowd," but they can make the stores clean and efficient. In my experience, they do a very poor job of that, with dirty stores, constant rearranging of merchandise, frequently bare shelves for popular merchandise in high-volume stores, and an extraordinarily poor checkout experience (a problem which also plagues Sam's Club). In my area, much of the same "crowd" shops at Aldi, but Aldi gets people in and out in a hurry.
They're the king of deceptive packaging, whether it's the slightly downsized facial tissue boxes or 20 cans of Coke instead of 24 in a case for the same price, or selling ultra-cheap crap wrapped in fancy packaging to make it appear as something that it's not. Aldi and Costco are generally able to provide higher-quality, lower-priced private label products.
Their stores are one of the least customer-focused operations I've ever experienced. Need help as a customer? Good luck. Price match? Sure, as long as it's Target and not Walmart.com, and subject to restrictions and limitations which they seem to arbitrarily determine. They have 30 registers and folks backed up into the aisles waiting to spend money and only a handful of registers are open. Managers, however, can often be seen standing around as idle observers. Pathetic.
My local Walmart is a high-volume store, and as a result, they have a fair amount of shrinkage. It's always interesting to hear about the folks who steal items and then try to return them at the same store for cash or merchandise credit, which is often when they're caught. Walmart doesn't seem to have figured out how to control this, either, except to treat every customer like they're trying to pull some scam over on the company. I lose patience quickly when a merchant treats me like a criminal because they can't control their own problem with theft.
Not surprisingly, Sam's Club suffers from many of the exact same issues.
Amazon, Aldi, Costco, Target, and even some mom and pops are killing them, and I still get the sense that they have no idea why. Walmart used to be the low-price leader, and was once lauded as having one of the most efficient logistical operations. That no longer appears to be the case.
I have been a defender of Walmart in the past, but as a customer, I've noticed a decline over the past several years. Every time I hear one of their executives make some bone-headed comment or give some stupid speech on something that has nothing to do with the core of their business, I cringe. Every company runs into trouble when they're distracted from their core competency and lose focus on their customers.
JKG
