Word: stores
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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...
...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...
That's the future. For now, getting shoppers to change their habits is difficult. In a store in Secaucus, N.J., 470 miles (750 km) east of Elyria, CEO Scott is looking sternly at a serving platter priced at $24.99 as if it didn't get the memo. Around the pricey platter, lower-cost merchandise has sold briskly, and Scott is seeing evidence that Wal-Mart's attempt to move up the fashion/design/price ladder still has a way to go. It's not clear whether shoppers simply won't buy higher-priced stuff at Wal-Mart or, as happened in apparel...
...would fling regional bosses to the far parts of the empire. They would return Friday and report Saturday morning at the big weekly meeting that has been held since Mr. Sam was in charge. Numbers would be counted; plans would be made; orders would be cut. In the field, store managers wouldn't change their socks unless the home office gave the go-ahead...