Wal-Mart and GE are in bed together?

[jtnospam]

Wal-Mart and GE are in bed together?

Two megabig corporations, getting together to screw the consumer out of his money? Say it isn't so! -Jitney

[Lou]

"consignment" is really the wrong term, George is talking about "leased departments" whereby the building (store in this case) simply rents out space to the seller(s). Its done to save the store the hassles of managing specialized departments while allowing the store to have a lot of different items available to the customers in the building. Example: The "girls" are looking at jewelry and the guy wanders off to the tools department.

Lou

[Vic Dura]

On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 13:05:29 -0400, George wrote Re Re: Wal-Mart and GE are in bed together?:

WalMart is indeed the 500 lb gorilla in the market place. It used to be Sears, but they stumbled. WalMart will stumble too. There are two WalMart super stores within 25 miles of me. During the past six years I have notice that both of them have become disgusting places to shop. The check out time is way longer than anyplace else, the rest rooms are filthy and the last piece of electronic equipment I bought I bought at Target for 10% less than SAMs was selling it.

It looks to me like they are maintaining their profit margin by skipping essential services. That can't last long.

[Duane Bozarth]

Actually, according to one report I saw, at least some of the materials on sale in Wally-World (and other mass merchandisers as well) are on consignment--mostly, the perishable goods is what that report implied.

In W-M, whole departments are actually sub-contracted to other invisible operators (shoes, cameras, not sure what else)...

The point is there is a veritable web of differing marketing tactics underway--virtually all of the points made in the thread have varying levels of accuracy and the same techniques aren't universally applied to all products/departments.

[Duane Bozarth]

That's quite a large city out here...only three I can think of offhand in the state.

[George E. Cawthon]

Like I said, I don't know modern marketing. But if the goods are on consignment, then what does that have to do with this thread? Somebody actually manufactures stuff to Walmart's specs and then sells it in the store on consignment? Seems like all the risk would be on the manufacturer.

[George E. Cawthon]

I must have had a bad day, since I rather like smaller towns. I think I was referring to towns with a populations of around 100,000.

[phlegmatico]

American customers are not the cleanest folks, especially not the unwashed masses that Wally caters to. Check out the E-Coli infection rates of USA

I've been in countries where the public restrooms didn't ever *become* very grotty in a day, or even a week.

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Put the blame where it belongs, whit the US Government. Wal-Mart had a good janitorial service, but since the government cracked down on the use of illegal immigrants and substandard wages, something had to go. IIRC, WM promised to get a better contractor and paid a big fine. Its the damned laws creating these problems

[Dean Swinger]