Word: stores
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Your new Wal-Mart is being baked on the premises. The company is testing a dozen new store prototypes that have lower sight lines, woodlike fixtures and a more department-store feel in some sections. Let's not get carried away: it's still a big-box store, but that box isn't quite so stuffed anymore. The stores will use tons of recycled material and be vastly more energy-efficient. Wal-Mart has pledged to reduce energy usage at its stores 30% by 2012. It has embraced compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) and less packaging. For instance, by next...
...company's 45-year-old business model--based on a continuously improving supply-chain loop--is better suited to developing economies like Mexico, Brazil and China, where it is doing well, than to mature markets like the U.S. and Japan, where it isn't. In the U.S., same-store sales increases are bumping along at 1% to 2% a month, while rival Target, the fashion-forward, design-centric glamour girl of discounting, runs up 2% to 4% monthly increases. Wall Street complains that Wal-Mart spends too much money opening the same old big boxes, so much so that...
...know what? So has Wal-Mart. Under Castro-Wright's prodding, Wal-Mart is trying to become a local merchant again. It is moving managers away from the all-powerful Bentonville, Ark., headquarters and closer to the customers. It is developing snazzier and highly efficient store designs to entice existing customers to shop more broadly across the store rather than just for groceries and health- and beauty-care products. "We have enough customers," insists Scott, 57, who can boast that nearly 20 million Americans shop at a Wal-Mart every day. But while they're happily buying toys, toothpaste...
...Mart shoppers like its stores but don't necessarily love them. Low-income shoppers, one of its three core groups, absolutely need the low prices. The two others aren't buying enough: an aspirational middle-income group that likes the brand names, and a third group of regulars that has plenty of spending power but tends to cherry-pick the store without really shopping...
...very un-Wal-Mart-like area that features low, wood-veneer (actually recycled plastic) side counters where towels are displayed. You can actually see over the department, and the sight makes you want to linger; you're not hemmed in by the usual 8-ft.-high (2.5 m) discount-store shelving crammed with merchandise. The assortment--the colors and styles--is broad and deep, even attractive. The prices are killer, natch, but it's the look of the department that is designed to stop traffic and perhaps get a shopper to take a glimpse at that $200 Dyson vacuum cleaner...