Case Study : Walmart Inc.

Wal-Mart is an American multinational retail corporation and one of the leading discount department retail stores (Wikipedia). It is the highest- grossing company in the United States (Fortune 2008a), and is by far one of the most successful companies worldwide. Wal-Mart offers a place to buy the majority of our goods under one roof like electronics, furniture, clothing, pharmacy, sports, food, books etc. Wal-Mart sells good at lower price than the others and this is even shown by its slogan “save money, live better”.  It drives out smaller and sometimes even the expensive stores out of business due to its lower prices. Wal-Mart provides jobs for thousands of

Question 1: What were the rights of Walmart, the employer, during these two organizing drives?

analyze sales data to find ways to improve store performance. Over time, however, Wal-Mart had

Competition is a strong driver in the free enterprise of America. Crusty Dough Pizza Company is no exception. While Crusty Dough Pizza Company varies in its number of competitors within 15 miles by store, this variance does not seem to correlate to higher or lower profits. When looking at the regression analysis completed using competitors within 15 miles as the independent variable and monthly profit as the dependent variable, we find that the correlation coefficient is a very low .133. It’s safe to say there is it not a correlation between these two figures (see Appendix A for detailed Regression Analysis Data).

Within the retail environment, scheduling and a rapid response to changing consumer sentiments are critical. As such, the organizations systems must reflect this change in consumer dynamics to maximize sales and profitability. A systems approach works well in accomplishing this task. In many instances, consumer demand, consumer sentiments and macroeconomic factors all influence one another. In the context of Macys, macroeconomic factors determine consumer demand and confidence. Attempting to forecast this demand, the organization must then adjust scheduling and inventory levels accordingly. The input elements in this system would therefore be aligned with macroeconomic considerations. Aspects such as income growth, discretionary income, consumer confidence, tax policy, and commodity prices all affect the system. For instance high gas prices, can potentially cause less discretionary income for individuals. This lack of discretionary income ultimately hinders the amount of spending on discretionary items. This lack of spending impacts Macys on the output side as the company must now lower inventory levels or markdown merchandise to compensate consumers. Therefore inventory management is critical system in which Macys can use to add value to the consumer, the company, and its

Based on our analysis, there are many competitors of Walmart, which are Costco Wholesale Corporation,

The Dollar General is an American wholesale company that was first initiated in Scottsville, Tennessee by Turner and Cal Turner. Its headquarters are located in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. The mission statement of the Dollar General is "Serving Others." This mission statement helps to bring out the innate requests and intentions of the company in the United States of America and other countries in the world. The company has a vision that describes how it manages to cater for four different types of people. These four groups of people include the customers, the community, employees, and shareholders. Within these categories of people, Dollar General aspires to serve others through deliver of price quality and terrific prices for customers, opportunity, and respect for employees, a superior return for shareholders and a better life for the communities.

Competition: There are few direct competitors of Walmart like Costco. This is because most companies cannot beat the price that Walmart offers its consumers. As a big box retailer, Walmart uses its size coupled with effective supply chain management to acquire its supplies at a highly discounted price. This enables to charge very little for its consumer goods, thereby attracting a lot of consumers. Nevertheless, stores like Costco are able to compete with Walmart. The more customers Walmart loses to Costco, the lower its revenue. Therefore, we expect a negative relationship between competition and revenue.

Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) were introduced in 1980 with the purpose of saving energy. They initially were very expensive and consumers were aware of many flaws that made them hesitant to purchase the bulbs and bring them into their homes. The positive effects of switching from alternative bulbs to CFLs were overshadowed by media attention highlighting the issues that remained unresolved. Wal-Mart pushed promotional programs in 2007 that were very successful. They introduced a private label at a lower price, offered online ordering, posititioned the products well, installed interactive displays and engaged with new partners to promote energy efficiency. In 2009 the CFLs were redesigned and

These competitors also have the potential to impact Costco and Wal-Mart, however. There has been increasing

Ragan Fretwell - Case 23: Walmart: But We Do Give Them a 10% Employee Discount

A. Wal-Mart realized through third party studies and internal research that the Chinese customer were significantly more cost-sensitive than those in other countries and that there existed a strong, established culture of frequently shopping around to find the absolute lowest prices. Through these studies, Wal-Mart also realized that customer satisfaction level greatly influenced customer loyalty in China. The greatest determinant of this satisfaction was made up of perceived value. The perceived value is composed of three sub factors: (1) Product price, (2) Relative price and (3) Promotion. The other factors for customer satisfaction in descending order of its importance are Image,

Wal-Mart is a company which operates in the service sector, more specifically in the “Discount, Variety Stores/Retail” industry. The company’s superior performance is demonstrated through the fact that it was America’s largest company (in terms of revenue) in 2002, and the reputation of the company is reflected in the opinion of “Fortune” who have identified Wal-Mart as one of the world’s most admired companies. In 2004 Wal-Mart had been hiring 1.4 million employees – making it the largest corporation in the world. Wal-Mart’s share prices have also been stable at time of stock market volatility. There are

We chose Walmart as the company to focus on for our business model canvas project. Considering that Walmart is the world’s largest retailer, as well as largest private employer, there is a plethora of information on this mammoth company. Sam Walton, Walmart’s founder, had a simple and noble vision for his stores; he said, “[We wanted to] reduce the cost of living for the people who shopped in our stores” (Soderquist, 2016). To this end, he created the big box retail format that we see in Walmart and other stores today. He envisioned a place where consumers could do their all their shopping under one roof and benefit from the discount pricing made possible by buying in bulk. His vision has given the world Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, as well as defining the big box business model that many others have copied.

We would like to show our gratitude to Resp. Prof. Mr. Sham Sharma, for providing us with the golden opportunity to prepare an intellectual report, on Distribution & Logistics Management of “wal-mart”.