Muscatine

Posted on April 12, 2011 

The last few days have seen a series of news stories, in the New York Times, CNNMoney, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, and others about how Walmart is going back to its “Everyday Low Price” roots. The company is touting that this return to the heritage that made the retailer so successful is going to turn around its continually declining same-store sales. The retailer is launching an ad campaign to make sure people know about the re-launch.

The problem is that Walmart actually “re-launched” this strategy back in September of 2010 and it didn’t stop the company from having continued negative same-store sales numbers.

Now, as it brings back items it dumped from its shelves, it is claiming that this will reverse the company’s decline. Walmart is now saying that it will bring back things like bolts of fabric and other items the dropped during the failed “Project Impact.” According to Time Magazine:

One goal of Project Impact is cleaner, less cluttered stores that will improve the shopping experience. Another is friendlier customer service. A third: home in on categories where the competition can be killed.

But Project Impact didn’t go as planned, backfiring completely. Begun around September of 2009, Project Impact was pretty much abandoned by late summer of 2010, ending the leadership of then-Walmart U.S. CEO Eduardo Castro-Wright (Walmart insists it hasn’t abandoned Project Impact).

While news outlets are writing about how Walmart is going to have a comeback as a result of these changes, there is another, perhaps more important story here: Walmart’s biggest initiatives, Project Impact and Rollbacks, have been massive failures. When the retailer moved away from those projects in 2010, those moves didn’t reverse its declining sales. Walmart’s announcement in September of 2010 that it was returning to EDLP wasn’t heard by consumers or investors and sales continued to decline.

Oh. my!

http://www.environmentalleader.com/2010/05/04/wal-mart-to-pay-27-6-million-for-environmental-violations-in-california/

Biggest polluters ever!

Spokesman David Tovar said in the Reuters article that Wal-Mart is working to resolve a separate federal probe looking into similar allegations.

  OOH OOH OOH....another federal probe! I am salivating over it!

It occurs to me that any decent person working for walmart and professing themselves to be a liberal would have a quandry, working for the largest polluter in America, and one who has paid the largest fines in America for pollution violations!

BB:  You are too polite to say it.  I will.  I've never met a liberal that wasn't a hypocrit.  They are very good at telling others how to live and passing laws that restrict our freedoms.  But these laws and regulations obviously don't apply to them!  They are too smart and are really above all that.  It's only for the greedy Republicans and the ignorant common people.  They can conveniently ignore all these do-gooder regulations and practices when those regs and practices impact negatively on their own lives.  The term "limousine liberal" didn't just happen.  And it has very little to do with actual limousines.