Was that because F&E was so overloaded with inventory they had to sell it before it expired? I thought they also had some Wild Oats merchandise at Walmart too? I think they just shoved the items into open space on the shelves.veteran+ wrote: ↑May 2nd, 2024, 9:31 am Futile attempt on this new label by Walmart. It's not their thing.
Walmart was officially selling F&E products in their stores for quite a while when F&E was still in business. For the most part these were high quality products.
They did a horrible job with it................really bad.
The Walmart systems generate item level unique planograms for every store. Thus automotive will have more sunshades instead of ice scrapers in California. The system tracks sales and adds/removes items at the store level. This is a huge problem for Walmart because when items are out of stock and the shelf labels disappear it is rare for anyone to notice and replace the missing labels so the counts are corrected and items reordered. They have items literally disappear because of this problem, and then the system will just delete the item from the next version of the planogram because the system thinks they have dozens of that item on hand but they're not selling when reality is they're not on the shelf to sell.
The old Sam's Choice items had inconsistent product flow to the stores and would run out frequently. I wonder how many of them just got "faced over" with regular product over stock to make the shelves fuller, the label removed, and the items never came back? This seems to occur with any item at Walmart that has inconsistent product flow. If you look at a Walmart that has just completed a remodel, they will have a far greater SKU depth than an identical store in the same town because they reset everything to chain standard and bring back every item.
One issue of note is SuperTarget which I haven't mentioned lately because I have not gone there. They have a truly horrible test going in some stores including one by me where they have basically reduced the SKU depth in the grocery aisles to the same meager assortment as a Pfresh. So where you had a shelf that may have had 8 kinds of ketchup, now you just have like 8 facings of Heinz in a pint squeeze bottle and 6 facings of a Target brand. It is one of the most idiotic things I've ever seen. Apparently this serves to empty the backroom of food overstock which is another problem as now there is a mass of the same SKU on the shelf and date rotation is damned near impossible so I'm finding freshest in front most of the time alongside expired items. Basically all of the items that massed out the aisles in the Super format were Target brands like Good and Gather, I would estimate that they carry about 5,000 additional SKUs normally in the Super format. So all of those are wiped out in these test stores, but the "perimeter" stays the same including the expanded bakery program, the staffed produce department where someone is constantly working on merchandising and culling, albeit they reduced SKUs in dairy to Pfresh level as well and just spread out facings the same way. I do not know how widespread this test is, I have two Supers within ten miles of me and one has it while the other doesn't. The one they left alone is Menifee which is allegedly their top SuperTarget in the chain.
So I wonder if Walmart senses that they can capture some of the customers in towns where Target is trying this idiotic drugstore quality food assortment and hoping they can deliver the knockout punch to the SuperTarget format. Adding basically a Walmart version of the thousands of Target branded items getting cut from these stores could be very beneficial to them if they pick the right items.
I do not believe Target is going to roll this program nationwide, and hopefully they just stop it in it's tracks before they really lose a lot of share. The store near me where they did this had been poorly operated for years as it opened in the late 2000s with more than half of its shopping center not built out and no homes nearby. The center is only being finished now with Home Depot and others opening in Spring 2025. They had finally been improving the standards in this mismanaged store and growing the business as there is a lack of supermarkets in the immediate area, but I suspect that they've lost a lot of the business they had gained with this stupid SKU reduction and multiple shelves of one SKU.