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When listening to Customers Hurts: Walmart's $1.85 billion Mistake

16 points by F_J_H 16y ago

jtbigwoo 16y ago
tl;dr I never went to Walmart because it was dirty and hard to navigate. Once they cleaned it out, there wasn't anything I wanted to buy!
jimwise 16y ago
I'm not sure that judging a retail sales strategy by change in sales between January and April of 2009 -- exactly the period when consumer confidence plummeted to match the tanking Dow -- is a great idea. For comparison, line up this chart http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#chart1:symbol=^dji;range=5y http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#chart1:s... with the one in the article... I guess the test will be whether sales will shoot up when they reverse this policy. (The article also doesn't say anything about whether they tested this approach in some stores before converting all stores; Walmart has a long history of mining their sales data to try to pick out patterns in store performance, so if this was done as abruptly as the article says, I'm surprised.)
- teilo 16y ago
  From the article: "- Same-store sales flipped negative (see chart above) at about the time many stores were remodeled to reduce clutter." I think, reading between the lines, that Wal-mart has the data which says that a significant number of remodeled stores flipped negative, where a significant amount of other stores did not. As you say, they have been doing this for a long time. The one (and only) reason I ever shop at Walmart vs. Target, is because Target has a horrible selection. They never have what I am looking for. Wal-mart usually did, even if it was cluttered. Don't get me wrong, I hate a cluttered store. But I'll shop in a cluttered store that has what I want, vs. a pristine Target-lookalike, that doesn't.
neworbit 16y ago
Moral of this story: drive your marketing decisions by data and analytics, not by fluffy market research. Asking people what they want usually results in "I'd like a pony."
cincinnatus 16y ago
The most astounding thing is they appear to have rolled this out without testing on a few prototype stores first. Stupidity arrogance there.

16 points by F_J_H 16y ago

tl;dr I never went to Walmart because it was dirty and hard to navigate. Once they cleaned it out, there wasn't anything I wanted to buy!

jimwise 16y ago

I'm not sure that judging a retail sales strategy by change in sales between January and April of 2009 -- exactly the period when consumer confidence plummeted to match the tanking Dow -- is a great idea. For comparison, line up this chart http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#chart1:symbol=^dji;range=5y http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#chart1:s... with the one in the article... I guess the test will be whether sales will shoot up when they reverse this policy. (The article also doesn't say anything about whether they tested this approach in some stores before converting all stores; Walmart has a long history of mining their sales data to try to pick out patterns in store performance, so if this was done as abruptly as the article says, I'm surprised.)

teilo 16y ago
From the article: "- Same-store sales flipped negative (see chart above) at about the time many stores were remodeled to reduce clutter." I think, reading between the lines, that Wal-mart has the data which says that a significant number of remodeled stores flipped negative, where a significant amount of other stores did not. As you say, they have been doing this for a long time. The one (and only) reason I ever shop at Walmart vs. Target, is because Target has a horrible selection. They never have what I am looking for. Wal-mart usually did, even if it was cluttered. Don't get me wrong, I hate a cluttered store. But I'll shop in a cluttered store that has what I want, vs. a pristine Target-lookalike, that doesn't.

neworbit 16y ago

Moral of this story: drive your marketing decisions by data and analytics, not by fluffy market research. Asking people what they want usually results in "I'd like a pony."

cincinnatus 16y ago

The most astounding thing is they appear to have rolled this out without testing on a few prototype stores first. Stupidity arrogance there.