Word: walmarts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...season to be shopping for best-selling books. Thanks to an almost comical price war that has broken out among a few of the country's retail giants, more people may be reading over the holidays. On Oct. 15, Walmart, the world's largest retailer, announced it was lowering its online preorder price for 10 new book releases. The new cost: a measly $10. The titles include the Sarah Palin memoir Going Rogue, John Grisham's Ford Country and Michael Crichton's Pirate Latitudes. Not to be outdone, Amazon.com matched Walmart's price on the same books. Walmart then lowered...
Then last week Target saddled up to the poker table. On Oct. 19 the retailer announced it would also sell preorders on seven of these books for $8.99. (Target.com has since matched Walmart.com and Amazon on all 10.) Walmart responded by dropping its price by another penny, to $8.98. There's no word whether Walmart then stuck out its tongue and yelled "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah" to its rivals. (See TIME's 2008 holiday buying guide...
...consumers, this war looks like an obvious score. Cheap books make tidy stocking stuffers. And for the retailers, particularly Walmart and Target, the discounts may not carry too much risk. Books are just a small slice of their portfolios. "Is Walmart making money selling books at $8.99? Probably not," says David Heupel, a senior equity portfolio manager at Thirvent Financial in Minneapolis. "This is a mass-merchant move to draw customers to the websites." The hope is that you poke around for a book and then add other, higher-margin products to your basket...
Amazon and Walmart declined to comment on their pricing practices. "This is a promotion in order to drive traffic," says Target spokeswoman Kelly Basgen. "This is not a long-term pricing strategy." Those words might be soothing to publishers. But shoppers might want to start stockpiling those books real fast...
Dollar Tree tends to look for locations in suburban shopping areas, near a Walmart, Target, Sam's Club or a large grocery chain, in an effort to lure bargain-seeking customers from these stores. "If we are where the shoppers are anyway, it's a win-win for the customer, and for us," says Reid. Boosting the number of stores may help it steal market share from its chief competitors, Dollar General and Family Dollar, which have also done well in the recession and have significantly more stores than Dollar Tree (around 8,500 and 6,500, respectively). Dollar Tree...