WMT: Lee Scott unplugged, unglued

NYT

Though Wal-Mart is three times larger than its next biggest retail rival, Mr. Scott appears to be preoccupied with competitors whose individual store sales are growing faster than Wal-Mart's — namely Target and Walgreens.

Asked about Wal-Mart's stock price, which has fallen 11 percent in the last five years. Mr. Scott said: "You cannot have Target or Walgreens beating you day after day after day." Mr. Scott wrote that one reason Wal-Mart's same-store sales were growing more slowly than Target's was that Wal-Mart's customers earn less and have been squeezed worse by soaring fuel prices.

"Wal-Mart's focus has been on lower income and lower-middle income consumers," he wrote. "In the last four years or so, with the price of fuel being what it is, that customer has had the most difficult time. The upper-end customer got a tremendous number of tax breaks about four years ago. They have been doing very well in this economy."

He said having to pay $50 to gas up a car did not change anything for rich customers, but did for those who didn't earn a lot. "It changes whether or not you go to the movie, whether or not you buy new sheets, whether or not you go out to eat."

Well, at least somebody, somewhere, in some official capacity admits that all is not Unicorns and Ambrosia out there in "The Heartland." A site called Wal-Mart Watch got ahold of leaked "Lee's Garage" archives, presumably, from not-so-gruntled WMT folk. The PDFs are linked on the site here.

One manager asks in the April 1, 2005 posting -- and I don't sense it was an April Fool's gag

“[long term associates] would realy like a full explanation as to why the largest company on the planet cannot offer some type of medical retirement benefits or access to some type of reduced benefit... Please at least give our folks a reasonable explanation as to why we can't do something for them in their golden years?

Lee gets a little testy

...Quite honestly, this environment isn’t for everyone. There are people who would say, ‘I’m sorry, but you should take the risk and take billions of dollars out of earnings and put this in retiree health benefits and let’s see what happens to the company.’ If you feel that way, then you as a manager should look for a company where you can do those kinds of things.”

Yeow. Over on the sidebar in a post on the documentary, The Corporation, I disagreed some with the producers' assertion that Corps fit the DSM/NIMH definition of Psycopathy. I think they're schizophrenics, at once bullies and Florence Nightingale, or rather, swinging manically between the two. Lee gets close, quoting Martin Luther King in some places and doing his best Gordon Gekko in others.

I spose we've heard much worse, but then again, Lee's Garage is an intranet forum, with questioner's names attached. Still, there are some choice nuggets along with the blatant kiss-ups like "How does it feel to be president and CEO of such a successful company?" (Gutsy eh?)

From the Jan 2006 pdf:

Q: To me it seems that ever since we stopped doing PA's and since you can never hear the ones on Wal-Mart Radio then our sales have dropped. That might just be me, but when we could do PA's we caught the ear of some of the customers that might not have come to tat side of the store. [Name and title redacted]

A: [From Lee Ann Mills, Sr. Mktg Mgr] Over the past 18 months, Wal-Mart corporately has done extensive research with our female shoppers to really understand what they think of the shopping experience in our stores. What we have found is that our competition is perceived as being a much more pleasant place to shop, so a percentage of our customers prefer to shop there - resulting in lost sales.

These shoppers say that our stores have traditionally been too crowded, have too many visual messages in signing and are much too noisy. Because we do have our Wal-Mart Radio network our TV network in-store, we did eliminate the PA's that were contributing to the noise level...

At store level you must continue to focus on displaying the right type of merchandise and be sure that we are competitive in our markets to encourage our shoppers to cross-shop all departments. Merchandising will focus on providing trend right, quality merchandise...

What on earth could she be talking about? I'd be damn proud if my feedstore looked like this.



Okay. Ignoring the dainty bride and the sad surrealism of the visual context, which side of the brain came up with this store layout and which side of the brain does it torture? Now, which side of the brain do we think says yes or no to writing the checks and "spending a little more, because I'm worth it"? "Supply chains," "FIFO." Now there's some freighted metaphors for another day.