

When listening to Customers Hurts: Walmart's $1.85 billion Mistake - F_J_H
http://dailyartifacts.com/walmarts-185-billon-dollar-mistake

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jimwise
I'm not sure that judging a retail sales strategy by change in sales between
January and April of 2009 -- exactly the period when consumer confidence
plummeted to match the tanking Dow -- is a great idea.

For comparison, line up this chart

[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#chart1:s...](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#chart1:symbol=^dji;range=5y)

with the one in the article...

I guess the test will be whether sales will shoot up when they reverse this
policy.

(The article also doesn't say anything about whether they tested this approach
in some stores before converting all stores; Walmart has a long history of
mining their sales data to try to pick out patterns in store performance, so
if this was done as abruptly as the article says, I'm surprised.)

~~~
teilo
From the article: "- Same-store sales flipped negative (see chart above) at
about the time many stores were remodeled to reduce clutter."

I think, reading between the lines, that Wal-mart has the data which says that
a significant number of remodeled stores flipped negative, where a significant
amount of other stores did not. As you say, they have been doing this for a
long time.

The one (and only) reason I ever shop at Walmart vs. Target, is because Target
has a horrible selection. They never have what I am looking for. Wal-mart
usually did, even if it was cluttered. Don't get me wrong, I hate a cluttered
store. But I'll shop in a cluttered store that has what I want, vs. a pristine
Target-lookalike, that doesn't.

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neworbit
Moral of this story: drive your marketing decisions by data and analytics, not
by fluffy market research. Asking people what they want usually results in
"I'd like a pony."

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cincinnatus
The most astounding thing is they appear to have rolled this out without
testing on a few prototype stores first. Stupidity arrogance there.

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jtbigwoo
tl;dr I never went to Walmart because it was dirty and hard to navigate. Once
they cleaned it out, there wasn't anything I wanted to buy!

