Shop Talk
Retailers, consumers and prices
Check Out Line: Sam’s Club outsources, sheds 10 percent of jobs
Check out Sam’s Club cutting 11,200 jobs or about 10 percent of its workforce as it outsources in-store product demos and sheds jobs for recruiting new business members to its warehouses.
Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart, will use a third-party company, Shopper Events , rather than its own staff to essentially hand out food samples or demonstrate electronics to passersby, allowing Sam’s Club to let go of about 10,000 mostly part-time workers. (Though they can apply for new jobs with Shopper Events.)
Sam’s Club is also getting rid of about 1,200 staff responsible for recruiting new business members.
(The move has some echoes of Saks Inc’s decision to offload workers at its cosmetics and fragrance counters at its Fifth Avenue flagship store by the end of this month and have outside vendors staff their counters.)
Sam’s Club’s moves could put extra pressure on rival Costco, which has resisted mass layoffs, said Wall Street Strategies analyst Brian Sozzi in a note on Monday.
Also in the basket:
* Italy’s Ferrero rules out bidding for Cadbury * Bang & Olufsen unexpectedly posts Q2 loss
Safeway, Walmart top list of most wanted gift cards
While giving gift cards may have declined in popularity, some are proving quite attention-worthy and can be cashed in for a pretty penny. Online gift card site plasticjungle.com buys gift cards for cash, and then resells them, often for a bit less than the amount left on the card. It also lets people donate cards to charities.
So, what stores are hot this holiday season?
Here are the cards the site is paying the most for — up to 90 percent of the face value:
– Safeway
– Walmart
– Target
– Sam’s Club
In an apparent twist of events, it appears that the famous Walmart multimillion dollar slogan “Always Low Prices” in its internet domain name form AlwaysLowPrices.com, has been sold to its adversary, Target. Target recently commenced using the domain to direct would-be Walmart customer traffic to its own site, Target.com.
While this news has surprised many, it is likely that the original owner of the domain name, internet guru, Brad Morehouse, finally sold the name. According to a statement made by Mr. Morehouse back in 2005, Walmart tried to “strong-arm” him into giving up the domain name. However, in this David and Goliath story, Walmart never succeeded in taking the name as Mr. Morehouse used the “I Can” (ICANN) law to protect his property. Essentially, since Walmart did not register the trademark prior to Morehouse’s purchase date, Walmart could do nothing more.
Other people with the “Always Low Prices” domain variants, such as “.net” and “.org” didn’t fair so well. Walmart forced a blogger by the name of Kevin to discontinue using the domain name “AlwaysLowPrices.net” According to him, Walmart alleged that he was using the slogan to take business from the multi-billion dollar corporation.
Both Brad Morehouse and Walmart marketing executives were unavailable for comment.
The greening of Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart, which helped promote the adoption of those funny-looking “green” lightbulbs, is making more room in its Sam’s Club warehouse stores for environmentally friendly products — including a water-saving toilet that has one button for flushing liquids and another for flushing solids.
Employees at a Sam’s Club in the discounter’s home town in Bentonville, Arkansas, have emptied shelves of things like power tools to make way for a variety of green products. Similar efforts have taken place in Sam’s Clubs across the United States.
“Our members need and are looking for things that will help them mitigate their energy bills,” said Joel Heiligenthal, buyer of home efficiency products at the club store chain.
Wal-Mart launched its own private-label compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) in 2007 and has been selling them in thousands of stores.
As part of an environmental push started under former CEO Lee Scott, Wal-Mart also has outlined plans to one day be supplied by 100 percent renewable energy.
Check out this video of new CEO Mike Duke telling reporters about the company’s ongoing sustainability efforts in a press conference on June 5.
(Photos: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi; Video/Lisa Baertlein)
The short story the Walton family.
Wal-mart was the giant’s shop that currently is spread almost all through the world, but inside in their wealthy, they forgot with someone who the real founder of Wal-Mart / WalMart, this Person was Mr. James Lawrence Walton/Bud Walton. All the big Walton surnames were recorded to the domain name, only http://www.JamesLawrenceWalton.com was forgotten and is currently owned by the other person in fact his not Americans.
We thing There none of Walton family even his daughter, maybe they too busy to count they money.
Love and money, sometime make someone confuse …
I see it a funny thing for richest family.
Welcome to Wal-Mart country
Reuters is attending Wal-Mart’s annual meeting this week and will be sending news, tweets and images from the event via Shop Talk.
Our tour will include visits to the company’s distribution center, a Sam’s Club warehouse store and a Walmart supercenter.
We’ll also get updates on the discounter’s plans for its international business, U.S. store remodels and, of course, send news from the annual meeting.
Walmart’s Store #1, pictured above, is featured on local tourist maps.
One thing that struck us on the drive from the airport to world biggest retailer’s headquarters of Bentonville, Arkansas, was the sheer number of “For Sale” signs on properties ranging from homes to commercial land.
Wal-Mart is often held up as the success story of these hard economic times, but when it comes to foreclosures its home town is no different from many others around the nation.
“For Sale” signs litter the landscape and housing communities are idled. Here’s a snippet from a recent story in The Morning News: Bentonville has 11 unfinished subdivisions in various states of completion, according to city records. Nine are not under active construction, and four of those are virtually abandoned, said Brian Bahr, the city’s current planning manager.
Sam’s Club tries luring new members with $10 deal
Wal-Mart is betting $10 and 10 weeks will draw new members to its Sam’s Club warehouses.
Sam’s Club and Costco work as membership clubs. Shoppers pay an annual fee that allows them to shop in the warehouses and get discounts on everything from diamond rings and big screen TVs, to bulk-sized packages of toilet paper or bottled water.
In the past year, the clubs have become popular with consumers and small businesses looking for ways to stretch their budgets as prices rise and paychecks shrink. But in this environment, cash-strapped customers may find the upfront fee a deterrent to joining the clubs if they are not already members.
Sam’s offers a variety of memberships, including a $40 one for individuals and a $35 membership for business customers that allows them to shop during special “business only” hours.
Sam’s Club has talked about wanting to improve its membership base, and in its latest push, it is now offering a $10 membership good for 10 weeks to families and businesses that are not currently members.
“With a temporary 10 week membership we’ll be able to give those who sign up a good chance to see what we can do for them everyday, and through the holidays,” said Mike Turner, vice president of membership at Sam’s Club, in a statement.
In July, Sam’s Club offered a special deal to attract college students. With a valid college identification card and college email address, students were able to buy a year-long membership for $40 and receive a $15 gift card.
If you do the math 10 dollars for ten weeks is more expensive than the 40 dollar annual fee. How does this benefit the consumer?
BJ’s: Prices are going up and competition may be “brutal”
Late last month, Costco warned its quarterly profit would miss Wall Street estimates as soaring costs and inflationary pressures ate into its margins.
While the cost of the goods it sells was going up, the No 1 U.S. warehouse club operator said it was delaying passing along price increases to shoppers in order to boost its sales and appeal to cash-strapped consumers.
“It is times like this, painful as it may be, that holding off on price-increasing certain key items, by even a few weeks, we believe helps and strengthens our business for the longer term,” Costco Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti said at the time.
BJ’s Wholesale, the No 3 U.S. warehouse club operator, said on Wednesday that it is keeping an eye on what its competitors are doing when it comes to marking up their prices.
“Inflation is a huge challenge for all retailers as we try to manage pricing in such a way that we recoup our costs while continuing to deliver value,” said BJ’s CEO Herb Zarkin on a call with analysts. “Our overall goal is to maintain our margin rate but it is quite a balancing act.”
But one thing is clear — BJ’s does not intend to undermine its profits by selling goods below cost.
“No rational retailer can accept these kind of increases and expect to make a profit. It’s just not going to work,” he said.
Who knew a grain of rice would cause a global ruckus?
Food costs have been soaring worldwide, spurred by increased demand in emerging markets like China and India; competition with biofuels; high oil prices and market speculation.
That situation has sparked food riots in several African countries, Indonesia, and Haiti. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that higher food prices could hurt global growth and security.
But the effect of rising prices took a surprising turn this week– at least a surprising turn by U.S. standards — when it comes to sales of rice.
Rice prices in particular have surged this year as exporters curb supplies. Trade bans on rice have been put in place by India, the world’s second largest exporter in 2007, and Vietnam, the third biggest, in hopes of cooling domestic prices.
Worried that rice prices may soar beyond affordable levels and worried that shortages abroad would be replicated at home, U.S. shoppers began buying up large quantities of rice.
The move caused warehouse club operators Costco and Sam’s Club, which sell large bags of the staple item and have lots of small restaurant owners as their customers, to limits sales of rice.
Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club warehouse chain said it was limiting sales of 20-pound (9 kg), bulk bags of Jasmine, Basmati, and long grain white rice to four bags per customer per visit, at all of its locations. It cited “recent supply and demand trends.”
People panic buy and hoard in the US as everywhere else but they can hardly be blamed for this with constant media coverage of the very real global food crisis .
Money is tight in the US and other industrialised countries , this is often ignored , sure, we dont see food riots in Times Square but poorer people in the ‘first world ‘, and there are no shortage of them, are certainly feeling the pinch with the cost of their average weekly shopping basket up about %30 or more on last year.
There is also an increased reliance on protectionist policies by staple producing nations who want to damp down effects of price rises domestically for political reasons, again this is getting media coverage, so its probabably ‘rational’ for consumers to panic buy or hoard if they can afford to to maximise their income and avoid spiralling costs. Whether panic buying and hoarding help is another question but we certainly do have a global food crisis on our hands , it isnt simply a media creation and it foretells of even worse problems down the line when the global population hit 9 billion and rising. Its a wake up call.
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Resident Shop Talk Expert
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