Walmart observations

Predicting the demise of Sears & Kmart since 2017!
Alpha8472
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by Alpha8472 »

My manager friend at Walmart said that her store is getting tons of clothing delivered and it is overloading the store. They are going to have to mark it down to even get rid of it. There is no room.

In other news, a gunman tried to rob another unnamed store. The employee freaked out and was so emotionally traumatized that she could not open any of the cash registers. The gunman walked over to another set of registers. Cashier was acting like go ahead shoot me in front of 100 witnesses. Little children, pregnant women... The gunman didn't have the guts to shoot and left. He got no money and the store got plenty of photos of him. Not to mention about 100 people capturing him on cellphone video. He wouldn't have enough bullets to shoot everyone.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by storewanderer »

The Wal Mart clearance jackpot seems to be about over at the store in my area that is majorly screwed up, currently run by "Manager: TBD."

All week they had many employees breaking down pallets, tagging merchandise, and piling it up. The softlines area was the best (or worst depending how you look at it) marking seemingly pallets and pallets of stuff down to $1. I saw dozens of $50-$60 coats marked down to $1. Various branded items in addition to private label and representing all categories- shoes, mens, kids, women's, accessories; Levis, Jockey, Swiss Tech, Reebok, all being marked down to $1. They had 3-4 employees basically working entire shifts for a few days to break down pallets, mark items down, pile the items into shopping carts, and let customers have at it (the freestanding clearance display racks were filled up first before the shopping carts were used). They had quite a system going where one would unpack boxes, two would scan the UPCs to mark down down to $1, and the fourth would tag the items and pile them into the carts.

But it wasn't just clothing, it was assorted stuff from throughout the store. The hundreds of clearance cell phone cases mostly regular $20+ for $1. The odd high number of boxes of Radon Test Kits regularly $15 for $1. Tons of drug/HBA stuff marked down to 10 cents or 50 cents. The last bits of Christmas stuff they've been finding boxes of in their storage trailers, 10 cents.

I can only imagine the loss on all of this inventory the previous store manager was just letting pile up in the trailers behind/beside the store. This may be how they do things in California Wal Marts (very high volume) but it doesn't work in these medium volume stores elsewhere and more aggressive markdowns are needed on an ongoing basis. I am confident this store, had they actually had this product on the sales floor from about November-April, could have sold all of this stuff at progressive discounts moving up to 90% off. Instead they now sell it at a minimum of 90% off (most items a higher percent off than that). This has to be easily many thousands of dollars of losses, plus the labor to sort through this mess.

I thought the Reno unit that converted all of its garden areas last fall into a mini warehouse (that store was also being run by "Manager: TBD") and took months to get through it was a jackpot. But this location doing this currently by far takes the cake. I've never seen an inventory giveaway to this extreme before.

It is funny how budgets, profitability, etc. all are no longer a concern when a Wal Mart becomes managed by "Manager: TBD." Then a few months later a new manager gets put in place and initially has unlimited resources but then a few months later the store gets all screwed up again under the new manager. Rinse and repeat, I guess. As long as the product keeps flowing... (and that it does)...
Alpha8472
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by Alpha8472 »

The problem is that Walmart's absurd policies make it hard to properly run a store. Walmart Corporate puts pressure on store managers to cut employee hours, have virtually zero overtime, staff as few cashiers as possible, staff as few floor employees as possible, etc.

You end up with long lines and angry customers. You end up losing many customers who would rather shop online than wait in lines. Then you end up with tons of customers using in-store pickup. So more employees get wasted by becoming personal shoppers. Personal shoppers work for free. Customers should walk around the store and shop for themselves. It is a drain on the company to do personal shoppers.

The corporate office is all about having as few people unloading the truck and moving goods to the floor. The merchandise just piles up in the back or on the floor.

Walmart has created this losing strategy of cost cutting that is killing its stores. You need to spend more money on employees so that the store gets restocked or else all that merchandise will not get sold. You end up marking it down and losing money.

A Walmart store in Pleasanton, California lost its manager recently. Employees said he was fired. This is a wealthy low crime suburb. The store was doing very badly in sales. Everything was out of stock on the shelves. Customers were constantly complaining. Nothing was being done. Why? The store manager was being forced to cut employee hours, stay on budget, etc. If you do not have enough employees to restock the shelves how are customers supposed to buy anything? Many customers went to other nearby stores such as Target or even other grocery stores. The Pleasanton Walmart looked like a ghost town. There were so few customers. They were all driven away.

If there had been more employees, the store would have been stocked better and all of those wealthy customers would have gladly shopped there. Instead, those customers fled this filthy unstocked store. How much money does it take to hire 1 janitor? The store was filthy. The bathrooms were dirty. In fact, one set of restrooms was blocked off. Apparently Walmart is too cheap to pay for a plumber so that set of restrooms has not been fixed in an eternity. Penny pinching and cost cutting is killing Walmart. Unless the Corporate office realizes this and makes some changes, this company will continue to lose customers to other stores and online.
Last edited by Alpha8472 on June 12th, 2022, 3:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by jamcool »

What other store? Target is just as bad as are Kohl’s, JCP, Ross, etc.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by Alpha8472 »

Actually, Target seems more upscale and pleasant. It doesn't have the selection of Walmart, but at least Target doesn't lock up merchandise in glass cases making you wait an hour for someone to help you. In the Pleasanton area, JCPenney and Ross actually seem well stocked compared to that awful Walmart.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by storewanderer »

Alpha8472 wrote: June 12th, 2022, 10:45 am

The corporate office is all about having as few people unloading the truck and moving goods to the floor. The merchandise just piles up in the back or on the floor.

Walmart has created this losing strategy of cost cutting that is killing its stores. You need to spend more money on employees so that the store gets restocked or else all that merchandise will not get sold. You end up marking it down and losing money.

A Walmart store in Pleasanton, California lost its manager recently. Employees said he was fired. This is a wealthy low crime suburb. The store was doing very badly in sales. Everything was out of stock on the shelves. Customers were constantly complaining. Nothing was being done. Why? The store manager was being forced to cut employee hours, stay on budget, etc. If you do not have enough employees to restock the shelves how are customers supposed to buy anything? Many customers went to other nearby stores such as Target or even other grocery stores. The Pleasanton Walmart looked like a ghost town. There were so few customers. They were all driven away.

If there had been more employees, the store would have been stocked better and all of those wealthy customers would have gladly shopped there. Instead, those customers fled this filthy unstocked store. How much money does it take to hire 1 janitor? The store was filthy. The bathrooms were dirty. In fact, one set of restrooms was blocked off. Apparently Walmart is too cheap to pay for a plumber so that set of restrooms has not been fixed in an eternity. Penny pinching and cost cutting is killing Walmart. Unless the Corporate office realizes this and makes some changes, this company will continue to lose customers to other stores and online.
I think the super screwed up store I have been watching for the past six months (and the problem now came to a big ugly head) had the same issue. A store manager was trying to run within budget so not using much labor, not wanting to mark clearance items down, etc. However, the store was always clean... just not stocked and a mess on the hardlines side. I would go into the store in the evening and nobody would be stocking anything but there would be pallets everywhere. Most other Wal Marts some nights you find people stocking hardlines but at this particular store it was like they dumped the entire swing shift cap stock crew.

Between October-December the majority of the other Wal Marts in the area were also without a store manager so I think that may also be how the problems at the above store slipped through. Whoever is in charge of the market (constantly restructuring...) was probably so buried by the stores that had no manager, they just assumed the few stores that actually had a manager must be running at least more smoothly. And maybe that was true.

I have heard what has been happening is the stores do such a high volume of pick up orders that they take the employees from all of the other departments and use them to fulfill pick up orders. So then the other departments die on the vine.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by buckguy »

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.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by Romr123 »

I think you hit on something there--we may be seeing the limits of WM's flexibility.

From my experience recruiting at college job fairs, the only WM people with much creativity are at the Silicon Valley/IT side of things--I wasn't seeing recruiting of high-pot people to be in the stores (not to mention Bentonville)... I'd speculate that WM gets the best of small private rural college and small/rural teachers' college business grads...and not much more than that as the pipeline for store level. Believe they just announced an initiative to start pipelining from colleges (!)

Target appeared to have a better-articulated path between Minneapolis and stores to develop deeper benches for both stores and design. They have a pretty traditional retail talent development structure (doubtless coming from the Dayton Hudson/department store model) with pretty-well articulated developmental steps (assistant manager at store/assistant buyer at HQ/divisional merchandise manager at store/buyer at HQ/store manager).
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by ClownLoach »

storewanderer wrote: June 12th, 2022, 8:06 pm
Alpha8472 wrote: June 12th, 2022, 10:45 am

The corporate office is all about having as few people unloading the truck and moving goods to the floor. The merchandise just piles up in the back or on the floor.

Walmart has created this losing strategy of cost cutting that is killing its stores. You need to spend more money on employees so that the store gets restocked or else all that merchandise will not get sold. You end up marking it down and losing money.

A Walmart store in Pleasanton, California lost its manager recently. Employees said he was fired. This is a wealthy low crime suburb. The store was doing very badly in sales. Everything was out of stock on the shelves. Customers were constantly complaining. Nothing was being done. Why? The store manager was being forced to cut employee hours, stay on budget, etc. If you do not have enough employees to restock the shelves how are customers supposed to buy anything? Many customers went to other nearby stores such as Target or even other grocery stores. The Pleasanton Walmart looked like a ghost town. There were so few customers. They were all driven away.

If there had been more employees, the store would have been stocked better and all of those wealthy customers would have gladly shopped there. Instead, those customers fled this filthy unstocked store. How much money does it take to hire 1 janitor? The store was filthy. The bathrooms were dirty. In fact, one set of restrooms was blocked off. Apparently Walmart is too cheap to pay for a plumber so that set of restrooms has not been fixed in an eternity. Penny pinching and cost cutting is killing Walmart. Unless the Corporate office realizes this and makes some changes, this company will continue to lose customers to other stores and online.
I think the super screwed up store I have been watching for the past six months (and the problem now came to a big ugly head) had the same issue. A store manager was trying to run within budget so not using much labor, not wanting to mark clearance items down, etc. However, the store was always clean... just not stocked and a mess on the hardlines side. I would go into the store in the evening and nobody would be stocking anything but there would be pallets everywhere. Most other Wal Marts some nights you find people stocking hardlines but at this particular store it was like they dumped the entire swing shift cap stock crew.

Between October-December the majority of the other Wal Marts in the area were also without a store manager so I think that may also be how the problems at the above store slipped through. Whoever is in charge of the market (constantly restructuring...) was probably so buried by the stores that had no manager, they just assumed the few stores that actually had a manager must be running at least more smoothly. And maybe that was true.

I have heard what has been happening is the stores do such a high volume of pick up orders that they take the employees from all of the other departments and use them to fulfill pick up orders. So then the other departments die on the vine.
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.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by ClownLoach »

Romr123 wrote: June 15th, 2022, 7:07 am I think you hit on something there--we may be seeing the limits of WM's flexibility.

From my experience recruiting at college job fairs, the only WM people with much creativity are at the Silicon Valley/IT side of things--I wasn't seeing recruiting of high-pot people to be in the stores (not to mention Bentonville)... I'd speculate that WM gets the best of small private rural college and small/rural teachers' college business grads...and not much more than that as the pipeline for store level. Believe they just announced an initiative to start pipelining from colleges (!)

Target appeared to have a better-articulated path between Minneapolis and stores to develop deeper benches for both stores and design. They have a pretty traditional retail talent development structure (doubtless coming from the Dayton Hudson/department store model) with pretty-well articulated developmental steps (assistant manager at store/assistant buyer at HQ/divisional merchandise manager at store/buyer at HQ/store manager).
Problem is that Target adopted the Walmart structure several years ago and eliminated the department level leadership model. Everything is aligned by store function instead. Guest Service, Ecomm team, Truck Team, Planogram Team, Sales Floor Team with no specialization. Used to be department level where a leader owned every aspect of their business except for truck stocking which was handled by a dedicated, fixed schedule all overnight 10pm-6am team. Now they've cost cut the labor and try to receive trucks at 4am with variable sized crews adjusted to truck size like Walmart. Before at Target the same people stocked the same department overnight each day and the store always knew what the labor budget would be so there were no surprises. Those days are gone. Target is really becoming a red version of Walmart which is why there is so much inconsistency in their operations today. A former model Target store in the top 20 volume in their company near me was so broken a few weeks ago under this new functional leadership model that all other local stores had to send help to bail them out. The average Team Lead or Executive Team Lead in this location previously had 20 or more years with Target and some opened the store in the 1980s. All were transferred to other stores and positions under this realignment and the entire store came crashing down in a matter of minutes.
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