Walmart observations

Predicting the demise of Sears & Kmart since 2017!
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by storewanderer »

buckguy wrote: June 15th, 2022, 6:04 am Nothing really surprising here. Walmart has continually cut back on management and made relatively extreme use of scheduling software for decades. The supply chain disruptions and the increasing transition to online ordering/store pick-up taxed the system. I 've been wondering what would break their system and this combination of factors seems to be doing it. They tend to recruit store managers from schools that aren't exactly Harvard and turn out compliant people who can work in a top down system that doesn't reward real initiative. I would imagine that even the pliant people reach a point where they look for and find other work. The decline of malls and many kinds of brick and mortar retail probably kept the labor market in check for a while, but now Walmart has a situation they can't control.

Their last annual report mentioned something cryptically about their operations changing as more of their customers shop online. I suspect that means that the stores will get even less investment in the future and whatever the skill of their logistics people, stuff is going to pile up and service will deteriorate further.
Wal Mart does not recruit store managers from schools historically (that is a Target thing). In fact just recently there was some press that they were going to start to do more recruiting from schools to try and beef up their store manager ranks due to the current store manager shortage. Historically, they recruited store managers from within. The vast majority of Wal Mart Store Managers worked their way up in the stores... even the ones at the present time that seem to be sinking pretty fast in the position.

There are limited cases where a store manager from a different retailer can go join Wal Mart and get on a fast track program to store manager but even that usually takes a couple years (or used to, not very long ago).

Also I don't know what you are talking about with Wal Mart's system not rewarding initiative in the context of the store managers as that is simply a flat out lie (that statement would be more true about Target). The Wal Mart Store Managers are heavily graded on sales performance of their store, along with remaining in budget. The store manager has a high degree of latitude in how to merchandise the free spaces/endcaps in the store and pricing as well. They have lost power on ordering over the years, that is pretty top down now, yes. A store manager that generates sales and remains in budget wins in the Wal Mart organization. It used to be pretty easy to do that (yes they worked hard... but they were given the tools- a steady flow of merchandise and the power to price it to sell). The problem is the Wal Mart organization for a number of years now keeps dealing the poor store managers a losing hand, every time. They keep restructuring things, losing middle management in the stores, one new program after another that doesn't stick, and you have the poor store manager trying to implement all of this stuff (in addition to the basic operations to try and drive sales in the store) and half of what is implemented is scrapped right as everyone is getting used to it, so it is a losing battle and this is why the position has become so high turnover.

Target on the other hand, wants a robot manager. They want a manager (I mean "store director") who is completely robotic, following everything Target says to the T. There is no room for your own ideas, your own opinions, or your own anything. Everything is a top down order. Everything is tracked by various metrics and the store manager is basically living or dying based on the metrics (I'm not talking about sales metrics, I'm talking about metrics like how long it takes to stock this shelf, how long it took this cashier to scan items, how long it took this receiver to unload a truck, how many out of stocks the store had, the response time for the store to fill the out of stocks once the system sent an alert to stockroom there was an out of stock, etc.).

Also that Target Store Director gets paid about half what a Wal Mart Store Manager gets paid... and there is a reason for that. All part of that rewarding initiative thing.
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Re: Walmart observations

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ClownLoach wrote: June 15th, 2022, 10:34 am

To throw something else in there - the average Target stockroom runs the entire length of the back wall of the store. The average Walmart stockroom - if there is one at all - would fit on the Target dock area. So if anything goes wrong in the Walmart model - power outage, lots of the truck team calls out sick, etc. suddenly they are forced to punt the freight to another day but don't have anywhere to put it. So they spend an inordinate amount of labor throwing it into a storage trailer behind the store and usually they never get back to it. The truck process is overly labor engineered - they get X number of minutes total per carton and that is it - the labor budget is adjusted automatically. So it is very easy to get behind and damned near impossible to catch up. And because of the authoritarian nature of the limited field management teams where a District is over 100 stores sometimes in multiple states - there is nobody to call for help without falling on the sword - and realistically nobody is going to show up and find out that the entire truckload is sitting in a storage container, or worse the entire perishable load was left out of temperature and had to be completely thrown into the compactor (I've heard this happens with alarming frequency at Walmart). Basically their model is so low payroll that they will wind up spending big dollars when they could have spent pennies to just allow the store to catch up after a mistake or a problem occurs. But when you have a culture where admitting a problem like too many call outs on truck day leads to your immediate termination as the Store Manager - you are encouraging malicious compliance, situations like the garden center that mysteriously became a stockroom, etc. that will eventually be found out when the DM makes their semi annual appearance and the rest of the neighboring stores couldn't send help to catch it up fast enough so the visit ends with the receipts being updated to Manager - TBD and then it really goes to hell in a handbasket.
It is very bad. I was in another Wal Mart yesterday that is turning the garden center into a stockroom (both the inside and outside parts of it) and at the same time trying to, you know, run a garden center (since it is summer). I am guessing this is a solution presented by the local market manager.

I was in yet another Wal Mart tonight, this store was a real mess throughout, understaffed, pallets all over, shelves a complete wreck throughout the store even in grocery, even worse than the typical thing. Store Manager who I know from previously is very good (basically the only one left in the area who has been in place here for more than a year) was in the store trying to direct various employees on various to dos around the store but it didn't seem to be going too well with a small crew of largely teenage employees.

Wal Mart has been collecting a small crew of employees who will go around from store to store to help out with stocking, etc. but they are so short staffed in my area (like most other places) that it helps but doesn't come close to solving the problem.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by Groceteria »

First time I’ve seen this: a Walmart in suburban Pittsburgh with a Halal fast food restaurant where the McDonald’s presumably used to be. Apparently it’s a chain or franchise based in NYC.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by Alpha8472 »

This company is franchising across the U.S., Canada, and the UK. They have a food truck in the college town of Davis, California near UC Davis.

This is sort of like a Halal food franchise and will be all over the place in a few years.

They serve gyros, falafel, lamb, and french fries. Some locations sell cheesesteaks, cheese burgers, chicken nuggets, wings, kebabs, fish, etc.

This chain is really taking off. The variety of food is amazing. People really should try it. McDonald's should be very afraid. There is some really good competition brewing.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by buckguy »

storewanderer wrote: June 15th, 2022, 11:23 pm
buckguy wrote: June 15th, 2022, 6:04 am Nothing really surprising here. Walmart has continually cut back on management and made relatively extreme use of scheduling software for decades. The supply chain disruptions and the increasing transition to online ordering/store pick-up taxed the system. I 've been wondering what would break their system and this combination of factors seems to be doing it. They tend to recruit store managers from schools that aren't exactly Harvard and turn out compliant people who can work in a top down system that doesn't reward real initiative. I would imagine that even the pliant people reach a point where they look for and find other work. The decline of malls and many kinds of brick and mortar retail probably kept the labor market in check for a while, but now Walmart has a situation they can't control.

Their last annual report mentioned something cryptically about their operations changing as more of their customers shop online. I suspect that means that the stores will get even less investment in the future and whatever the skill of their logistics people, stuff is going to pile up and service will deteriorate further.
Wal Mart does not recruit store managers from schools historically (that is a Target thing). In fact just recently there was some press that they were going to start to do more recruiting from schools to try and beef up their store manager ranks due to the current store manager shortage. Historically, they recruited store managers from within. The vast majority of Wal Mart Store Managers worked their way up in the stores... even the ones at the present time that seem to be sinking pretty fast in the position.

There are limited cases where a store manager from a different retailer can go join Wal Mart and get on a fast track program to store manager but even that usually takes a couple years (or used to, not very long ago).

Also I don't know what you are talking about with Wal Mart's system not rewarding initiative in the context of the store managers as that is simply a flat out lie (that statement would be more true about Target). The Wal Mart Store Managers are heavily graded on sales performance of their store, along with remaining in budget. The store manager has a high degree of latitude in how to merchandise the free spaces/endcaps in the store and pricing as well. They have lost power on ordering over the years, that is pretty top down now, yes. A store manager that generates sales and remains in budget wins in the Wal Mart organization. It used to be pretty easy to do that (yes they worked hard... but they were given the tools- a steady flow of merchandise and the power to price it to sell). The problem is the Wal Mart organization for a number of years now keeps dealing the poor store managers a losing hand, every time. They keep restructuring things, losing middle management in the stores, one new program after another that doesn't stick, and you have the poor store manager trying to implement all of this stuff (in addition to the basic operations to try and drive sales in the store) and half of what is implemented is scrapped right as everyone is getting used to it, so it is a losing battle and this is why the position has become so high turnover.

Target on the other hand, wants a robot manager. They want a manager (I mean "store director") who is completely robotic, following everything Target says to the T. There is no room for your own ideas, your own opinions, or your own anything. Everything is a top down order. Everything is tracked by various metrics and the store manager is basically living or dying based on the metrics (I'm not talking about sales metrics, I'm talking about metrics like how long it takes to stock this shelf, how long it took this cashier to scan items, how long it took this receiver to unload a truck, how many out of stocks the store had, the response time for the store to fill the out of stocks once the system sent an alert to stockroom there was an out of stock, etc.).

Also that Target Store Director gets paid about half what a Wal Mart Store Manager gets paid... and there is a reason for that. All part of that rewarding initiative thing.
There are labor academics like Nelson Lichtenstein, as well as journalists who have been been tracking Walmart's hiring practices for many years. Lichtenstein follows more than Walmart and is writing a book on the recent evolution of retail.

As for initiative, I wouldn't consider "making your numbers" to be a spur to initiative unless you were living in the Stalinist Soviet Union, where "making your numbers" would have led to the same kind of outcome if there had been a decent supply chain. The closest thing to a capitalist would have been Jack Welch's policy's that essentially disabled GE as a functioning manufacturing company. Basically, it leads to gaming the system, at best, and piling up inventory at worst. Walmart has been squeezing store management to a greater and greater degree over the last 20-30 years, so it finally has reached the point where it's not sustainable.

Many aspects of Walmart's business model have been on their way to unsustainability for a long time. Except for a bump after the property bubble burst, they have been largely stagnant for a long time. They have no place to really expand anymore, they have run out of new lines, and lots of people avoid them like the plague. The should have gone all-in on online retail a long time ago---it speaks to their logistics strengths. They've squandered that opportunity and their brand hurt the operations they bought. They will have even more difficulty running their stores in the future.

The irony here is that Walmart's main strength has always been logistics---Sam Walton famously disliked the way inventory was managed by Butler Brothers when they ran Ben Franklin and he was a franchisee and it's easy to characterize Walmart as a logistics operation in the same way that Amazon always has been essentially a software company. The just-in-time model works well when there is steady state to things, but not so much when there are wild shifts in supply and demand.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by Romr123 »

Very good point. They bought several companies (Bonobos/Moosejaw) at about the same time they bought Jet.com and all of them have, to be charitable, either collapsed/been absorbed or treaded water. I formerly would purchase from Jet.com from time to time (they had an interesting model where they would alter your shipping cost depending on what you were buying and where it came from) but as soon as WM bought it--never bothered again.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by Super S »

I noticed something tonight at Walmart which might be a cost saving move. The perimeter lighting (at the wall) around the entire edge of the inside of the store was turned off for some reason. This doesn't really stick out unless you are at the wall looking for something. This particular Walmart has skylights but only on the grocery side, so I don't think these are controlled by light sensors. Not sure if the savings is significant with LED lighting, but it could add up with enough lights I guess. I did not notice any other lights that were shut off.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by storewanderer »

buckguy wrote: June 20th, 2022, 8:46 am
There are labor academics like Nelson Lichtenstein, as well as journalists who have been been tracking Walmart's hiring practices for many years. Lichtenstein follows more than Walmart and is writing a book on the recent evolution of retail.

As for initiative, I wouldn't consider "making your numbers" to be a spur to initiative unless you were living in the Stalinist Soviet Union, where "making your numbers" would have led to the same kind of outcome if there had been a decent supply chain. The closest thing to a capitalist would have been Jack Welch's policy's that essentially disabled GE as a functioning manufacturing company. Basically, it leads to gaming the system, at best, and piling up inventory at worst. Walmart has been squeezing store management to a greater and greater degree over the last 20-30 years, so it finally has reached the point where it's not sustainable.

Many aspects of Walmart's business model have been on their way to unsustainability for a long time. Except for a bump after the property bubble burst, they have been largely stagnant for a long time. They have no place to really expand anymore, they have run out of new lines, and lots of people avoid them like the plague. The should have gone all-in on online retail a long time ago---it speaks to their logistics strengths. They've squandered that opportunity and their brand hurt the operations they bought. They will have even more difficulty running their stores in the future.

The irony here is that Walmart's main strength has always been logistics---Sam Walton famously disliked the way inventory was managed by Butler Brothers when they ran Ben Franklin and he was a franchisee and it's easy to characterize Walmart as a logistics operation in the same way that Amazon always has been essentially a software company. The just-in-time model works well when there is steady state to things, but not so much when there are wild shifts in supply and demand.
I don't know what more "initiative" a retail store manager can get than to have the freedom to merchandise their store, price their store, as they see fit, to meet sales goals and profit goals. This is consistent with most retailers including the grocery store chains. The only difference with Wal Mart is their pay one of the highest store manager salaries/bonuses in retail so there is a huge reward for the person who has the initiative to thrive in the Wal Mart ecosystem. The problem is the past five years they have made it nearly impossible for the store manager to be successful due to constantly changing strategies, restructurings, lack of support, and too many new/abandoned programs. Wal Mart built its business by having a program that motivated and encouraged store manager initiative. Did you ever read Sam Walton's book? Did you ever go to the museum in Bentonville? The old Wal Mart up until the 90's was a very different animal from today's company.

Now if you are talking about Target where the store manager has zero control over merchandising (corporate tells them what goes where, when to change a display, etc.), zero control over pricing, but still being pushed hard to meet a ton of metric based numbers (like how many items were stocked in an hour, how much time did it take the warehouse to pull items, how much time did it take your staff to respond to a customer service call box, how many items per hour did a .com employee fulfill, and tons more) and metrics then I agree with you yes, that is very much like living in a Stalinist Soviet Union. That does not leave much room for initiative because you basically have no control other than to push push push the employees.

Also I don't know what is wrong with being a cash cow anyway. Growth is not infinite and there is a natural cycle in business from boom/growth to maturity/cash cow. Folks with an attitude like you have that basically seems to write a company off if it isn't growing are missing the fact that if a company can be a stable cash cow and continue to profitably operate its business and at least grow revenue consistent with inflation that it can be okay for decades. Yes it isn't fun or glamorous but it is safe and predictable.

Wal Mart's supply chain is a well oiled machine. If only the stores were a well oiled machine that could get the goods on the shelf at the speed with which the supply chain gets the goods to the stores... a lot easier to run a private distribution center than it is to run a public store.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by veteran+ »

buckguy wrote: June 20th, 2022, 8:46 am
storewanderer wrote: June 15th, 2022, 11:23 pm
buckguy wrote: June 15th, 2022, 6:04 am Nothing really surprising here. Walmart has continually cut back on management and made relatively extreme use of scheduling software for decades. The supply chain disruptions and the increasing transition to online ordering/store pick-up taxed the system. I 've been wondering what would break their system and this combination of factors seems to be doing it. They tend to recruit store managers from schools that aren't exactly Harvard and turn out compliant people who can work in a top down system that doesn't reward real initiative. I would imagine that even the pliant people reach a point where they look for and find other work. The decline of malls and many kinds of brick and mortar retail probably kept the labor market in check for a while, but now Walmart has a situation they can't control.

Their last annual report mentioned something cryptically about their operations changing as more of their customers shop online. I suspect that means that the stores will get even less investment in the future and whatever the skill of their logistics people, stuff is going to pile up and service will deteriorate further.
Wal Mart does not recruit store managers from schools historically (that is a Target thing). In fact just recently there was some press that they were going to start to do more recruiting from schools to try and beef up their store manager ranks due to the current store manager shortage. Historically, they recruited store managers from within. The vast majority of Wal Mart Store Managers worked their way up in the stores... even the ones at the present time that seem to be sinking pretty fast in the position.

There are limited cases where a store manager from a different retailer can go join Wal Mart and get on a fast track program to store manager but even that usually takes a couple years (or used to, not very long ago).

Also I don't know what you are talking about with Wal Mart's system not rewarding initiative in the context of the store managers as that is simply a flat out lie (that statement would be more true about Target). The Wal Mart Store Managers are heavily graded on sales performance of their store, along with remaining in budget. The store manager has a high degree of latitude in how to merchandise the free spaces/endcaps in the store and pricing as well. They have lost power on ordering over the years, that is pretty top down now, yes. A store manager that generates sales and remains in budget wins in the Wal Mart organization. It used to be pretty easy to do that (yes they worked hard... but they were given the tools- a steady flow of merchandise and the power to price it to sell). The problem is the Wal Mart organization for a number of years now keeps dealing the poor store managers a losing hand, every time. They keep restructuring things, losing middle management in the stores, one new program after another that doesn't stick, and you have the poor store manager trying to implement all of this stuff (in addition to the basic operations to try and drive sales in the store) and half of what is implemented is scrapped right as everyone is getting used to it, so it is a losing battle and this is why the position has become so high turnover.

Target on the other hand, wants a robot manager. They want a manager (I mean "store director") who is completely robotic, following everything Target says to the T. There is no room for your own ideas, your own opinions, or your own anything. Everything is a top down order. Everything is tracked by various metrics and the store manager is basically living or dying based on the metrics (I'm not talking about sales metrics, I'm talking about metrics like how long it takes to stock this shelf, how long it took this cashier to scan items, how long it took this receiver to unload a truck, how many out of stocks the store had, the response time for the store to fill the out of stocks once the system sent an alert to stockroom there was an out of stock, etc.).

Also that Target Store Director gets paid about half what a Wal Mart Store Manager gets paid... and there is a reason for that. All part of that rewarding initiative thing.
There are labor academics like Nelson Lichtenstein, as well as journalists who have been been tracking Walmart's hiring practices for many years. Lichtenstein follows more than Walmart and is writing a book on the recent evolution of retail.

As for initiative, I wouldn't consider "making your numbers" to be a spur to initiative unless you were living in the Stalinist Soviet Union, where "making your numbers" would have led to the same kind of outcome if there had been a decent supply chain. The closest thing to a capitalist would have been Jack Welch's policy's that essentially disabled GE as a functioning manufacturing company. Basically, it leads to gaming the system, at best, and piling up inventory at worst. Walmart has been squeezing store management to a greater and greater degree over the last 20-30 years, so it finally has reached the point where it's not sustainable.

Many aspects of Walmart's business model have been on their way to unsustainability for a long time. Except for a bump after the property bubble burst, they have been largely stagnant for a long time. They have no place to really expand anymore, they have run out of new lines, and lots of people avoid them like the plague. The should have gone all-in on online retail a long time ago---it speaks to their logistics strengths. They've squandered that opportunity and their brand hurt the operations they bought. They will have even more difficulty running their stores in the future.

The irony here is that Walmart's main strength has always been logistics---Sam Walton famously disliked the way inventory was managed by Butler Brothers when they ran Ben Franklin and he was a franchisee and it's easy to characterize Walmart as a logistics operation in the same way that Amazon always has been essentially a software company. The just-in-time model works well when there is steady state to things, but not so much when there are wild shifts in supply and demand.

Excellent Macro point of view.

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Re: Walmart observations

Post by pseudo3d »

buckguy wrote: June 20th, 2022, 8:46 am
storewanderer wrote: June 15th, 2022, 11:23 pm
buckguy wrote: June 15th, 2022, 6:04 am Nothing really surprising here. Walmart has continually cut back on management and made relatively extreme use of scheduling software for decades. The supply chain disruptions and the increasing transition to online ordering/store pick-up taxed the system. I 've been wondering what would break their system and this combination of factors seems to be doing it. They tend to recruit store managers from schools that aren't exactly Harvard and turn out compliant people who can work in a top down system that doesn't reward real initiative. I would imagine that even the pliant people reach a point where they look for and find other work. The decline of malls and many kinds of brick and mortar retail probably kept the labor market in check for a while, but now Walmart has a situation they can't control.

Their last annual report mentioned something cryptically about their operations changing as more of their customers shop online. I suspect that means that the stores will get even less investment in the future and whatever the skill of their logistics people, stuff is going to pile up and service will deteriorate further.
Wal Mart does not recruit store managers from schools historically (that is a Target thing). In fact just recently there was some press that they were going to start to do more recruiting from schools to try and beef up their store manager ranks due to the current store manager shortage. Historically, they recruited store managers from within. The vast majority of Wal Mart Store Managers worked their way up in the stores... even the ones at the present time that seem to be sinking pretty fast in the position.

There are limited cases where a store manager from a different retailer can go join Wal Mart and get on a fast track program to store manager but even that usually takes a couple years (or used to, not very long ago).

Also I don't know what you are talking about with Wal Mart's system not rewarding initiative in the context of the store managers as that is simply a flat out lie (that statement would be more true about Target). The Wal Mart Store Managers are heavily graded on sales performance of their store, along with remaining in budget. The store manager has a high degree of latitude in how to merchandise the free spaces/endcaps in the store and pricing as well. They have lost power on ordering over the years, that is pretty top down now, yes. A store manager that generates sales and remains in budget wins in the Wal Mart organization. It used to be pretty easy to do that (yes they worked hard... but they were given the tools- a steady flow of merchandise and the power to price it to sell). The problem is the Wal Mart organization for a number of years now keeps dealing the poor store managers a losing hand, every time. They keep restructuring things, losing middle management in the stores, one new program after another that doesn't stick, and you have the poor store manager trying to implement all of this stuff (in addition to the basic operations to try and drive sales in the store) and half of what is implemented is scrapped right as everyone is getting used to it, so it is a losing battle and this is why the position has become so high turnover.

Target on the other hand, wants a robot manager. They want a manager (I mean "store director") who is completely robotic, following everything Target says to the T. There is no room for your own ideas, your own opinions, or your own anything. Everything is a top down order. Everything is tracked by various metrics and the store manager is basically living or dying based on the metrics (I'm not talking about sales metrics, I'm talking about metrics like how long it takes to stock this shelf, how long it took this cashier to scan items, how long it took this receiver to unload a truck, how many out of stocks the store had, the response time for the store to fill the out of stocks once the system sent an alert to stockroom there was an out of stock, etc.).

Also that Target Store Director gets paid about half what a Wal Mart Store Manager gets paid... and there is a reason for that. All part of that rewarding initiative thing.
There are labor academics like Nelson Lichtenstein, as well as journalists who have been been tracking Walmart's hiring practices for many years. Lichtenstein follows more than Walmart and is writing a book on the recent evolution of retail.

As for initiative, I wouldn't consider "making your numbers" to be a spur to initiative unless you were living in the Stalinist Soviet Union, where "making your numbers" would have led to the same kind of outcome if there had been a decent supply chain. The closest thing to a capitalist would have been Jack Welch's policy's that essentially disabled GE as a functioning manufacturing company. Basically, it leads to gaming the system, at best, and piling up inventory at worst. Walmart has been squeezing store management to a greater and greater degree over the last 20-30 years, so it finally has reached the point where it's not sustainable.

Many aspects of Walmart's business model have been on their way to unsustainability for a long time. Except for a bump after the property bubble burst, they have been largely stagnant for a long time. They have no place to really expand anymore, they have run out of new lines, and lots of people avoid them like the plague. The should have gone all-in on online retail a long time ago---it speaks to their logistics strengths. They've squandered that opportunity and their brand hurt the operations they bought. They will have even more difficulty running their stores in the future.

The irony here is that Walmart's main strength has always been logistics---Sam Walton famously disliked the way inventory was managed by Butler Brothers when they ran Ben Franklin and he was a franchisee and it's easy to characterize Walmart as a logistics operation in the same way that Amazon always has been essentially a software company. The just-in-time model works well when there is steady state to things, but not so much when there are wild shifts in supply and demand.
Most of Walmart's e-commerce ventures have all failed. The problems are in their stores. Even before COVID, Walmart was getting plagued with out-of-stocks. SKUs were constantly getting cut (there was a big cutback around 2010 that was partially reversed) and staffing has plummeted. The continuous pushing of food and the discontinuation of the Supercenter name meant that food was being pushed even in Division I stores, though the perishables at Walmart have been historically abysmal and attempts to expand Neighborhood Market and the short-lived "Walmart Express" have also flopped.

I think another component that Walmart has overlooked is the rise of giant supermarkets. Around here it's H-E-B and Kroger Marketplace, but I imagine the basic food and drug center has also worked against them. While Walmart dominates on non-food, with the corresponding departments often weak or non-existent in other stores (like soft goods), they've picked off enough categories and items that you can avoid Walmart in most cases.

Right now, Walmart seems to be in the phase of business where things are going nominally well...their stores are packed out and the company is profitable, but traditional expansion is sputtering out and enough problems have built up under the hood that a more agile competitor (of which Walmart was once one) can eat their lunch.
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