Wal-Mart doing more with less, and struggling, relatively speaking

What a fucking idiot. Walmart has never bought lots and lots of ads from any newspaper, at least not in the last 20 years.

 

Precisely.

In my own corner of the world, it reminds me of the hatred a lot of people have for Starbucks.

But, guess what? How many of you would have a career in specialty coffee if Starbucks hadn't essentially invented the market?

 

Wal-Mart has made some companies massively wealthy and good enough that they can now tell Wal-Mart to go fuck themselves.

Also of note, had dinner with a couple of Wal-Mart executives a couple days back. When you consider where I live, that's not a very big deal. Anyway, one of the things Wal-Mart is studying right now -- HARD -- is the Google glasses for employees.

The glasses could spot problems with stocking, etc, then note the problem, send a message to the correct person and the shelf that was missing bread would get restocked. All while the employee was working on something else. Like helping a customer, or not helping a customer and talking to someone they knew in the store.

Don't be surprised if you see some breathless *scoop* in the next few weeks/months about a Wal-Mart and Google partnership or the rollout of a Google product designed for retail workers to increase efficiencies or whatever corporate buzzword is the word of the day.

 

That is because Hostess went under. Happened all over and not just Wal-Mart.

 

No shit.

It wasn't like I was a world-class authority on everything back in those days (actually more than 20 years ago), but just about everything I ever read about Sam Walton was that the old khundt DID NOT BELIEVE IN NEWSPAPER ADVERTISING. At All. Period, the end, end of story. It was one of the cornerstones of his whole philosophy.

I dug up one of the books that detailed this at great length and showed it to our Ad Man. "Ohhh the Wal-Mart guys say to pay no attention to any of that, it's all media misinformation," he said. "They said they had decided that OUR TOWN would be a great place to test their new strategy of going heavy into newspaper ads."

Uh Huh. Sure. You Betcha. : :

So in the end the stupid shit ended up selling the paper out for about 3 weeks of a 3 x 6 b&w display ad.

I think they did start out with a full page ad, then a couple days later it was a half-page, then a quarter page, and so on and so on.

But they SAID they were gonna buy Lots and Lots of Ads!!

So we bent over.

 

Do you have any idea how fucking stupid you sound?

 

To a dungbreather like you, not fit to sniff my intellectual underwear? Not really worried.

 

I bet you used to be something average in your heyday. Decades and decades ago.

 

A smart move for the savvy Walmart shopper is the new "self check out". Usually can pocket every fifth item at no charge because they're understaffed. Or so I hear.

If you want an easier shopping experience: go to Walmart on NASCAR Sunday and Target whenever a new Bachelor/DWTS is airing. No lines.

 

Can't tell you what our neighborhood Wal Mart is like. I won't go there. The shoppers are less ugly at Target.

 

Hostess didn't distribute Walmart's own brand. And they didn't own Sara Lee. There was no bread there.

 

There's stores where Walmart actually removed the self checkouts because it was easy to sneak things out through them.