I ((Heart)) Wal-Mart
Saturday, January 13, 2007
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Fast Company has a interesting anti-Wal-Mart article that intrigued me even though we shop there regularly and spend about 15% of our annual income there (no joke).
Apparently, low prices are bad for certain company and the images - and you could make an argument that it is bad for America. But don't you have to buy goods from somewhere? Isn't this just taking a shot at the big guys (Saddleback, McDonalds both come to mind). My favorite part is where one guy near the end of the piece suggests that Wal-Mart is like Saddam Hussein - lovely. Here's a clip of what essentially boils down to a case study of Vlasic pickles:
JGA gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic's gallon jar of pickles.
Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97--a year's supply of pickles for less than $3! "They were using it as a 'statement' item," says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the "mad scientist" of Vlasic's gallon jar. "Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart's about. You can buy a stinkin' gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it's the nation's number-one brand."
Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world's largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. And the fevered buying spree that resulted distorted every aspect of Vlasic's operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.
Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us "every day low prices." It's the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart.
posted by Unknown @ 11:19 PM |
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3 Comments:
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At 1/14/2007,
Bryant Johnson said...
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good read. i submitted it to digg.
http://digg.com/business_finance/The_Wal_Mart_You_Don_t_Know -
At 1/15/2007,
SpirituallyStarving said...
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WalMart = Bad ... but I still have to shop there. We have a WalMart just 1.3 miles from our house. It takes me less than 3 min walking from my front door out to walking in their front door.
I would love to shop at some of the other stores in the area but they are all gone. The only places around them left are support or specialty stores. RadioShack, GameStop, Cellular Phone places...
I have mixed emotions, but I still buy the jar of pickles. -
At 1/16/2007,
said...
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Why in the world would you shop at Wal-Mart when there are Targets in the world? Target is where it's at, yo.
