The Walmart near me isn't like this. Only #2 is true.

Walmart is probably the #1 big box store where I live. Everyone shops there, rich and poor alike. It's clean, the people are fine and the staff are as happy as any other big box store staff. The Walmarts in the adjacent towns are similar. Most Walmarts I've seen are about like this. The tire center will have a Festiva in one bay and a Tesla in the nest

The Walmart near my work is very different. Way more dismal in all the ways you've described. I dunno about the gambling thing, that may vary by state and I've never seen it anywhere. But where I work has enough wealthy people to support other stores so the Walmart clientele is much poorer on average. I've been in probably a dozen Walmarts over the years and it's by far the worst.

It's similar to visiting a small town DMV.

Your description of gambling machines reminds me of my last visit back home in IL, after they legalized gambling. It's very jarring to walk past locals glued to video slot machines at 9AM in a gas station. It's depressing as hell, I'm sure the walmarts have cashed in on the action too but I didn't visit one while there.

They've installed these gates at the walmart nearest to me that essentially force you to walk through a checkout line even if you don't end up buying anything. Most necessities are locked in cases and I always struggle to find the single employee with the key to any particular case, who then has to follow me to the checkout and have me pay for the item immediately.

The H-E-B two miles down the road is significantly nicer in almost every capacity and only marginally more expensive. The time I save not waiting in checkout lines (I scan everything on my phone at H-E-B then bag it while I shop) and looking for keys quite literally makes up the price difference and then some.

I've lived in five different states and been to Walmarts and flipped cars and the variance is EXACTLY like variance in DMVs in both QoS, clientele/employee demographics.

Another interesting window in this vein is the local courthouse. The smaller towns don't separate out traffic violations from everything else, it's all on display handled in one room. You can get a sense of what's going on and the type of people in a given small town rather quickly this way.

When there's just one grocer serving a given area, it's effectively the same situation. But when competition eventually arrives, I think they tend to quickly divide along class boundaries.

Around here there's only one grocery store in my local town, and as a result it's actually pretty decent. The exact same chain has a very similar store in a significantly larger town ~25 miles away, where there's a competing upper-class grocer in the adjacent lot. The effect is devastating on the mediocre chain. Customers are treated poorly, the place is a filthy mess, cashiers aren't even trusted enough to manually enter prices when a barcode won't scan. The contrast is shocking, just next door in the higher end grocer none of these problems are experienced, but the prices are slightly higher.

This is why Walgreens is closing stores in SF. They cannot survive with the rampant unprosecuted shoplifting in SF.

I can say some of the shops around here have always been pricey, but a Lidl came in to town and manages to undercut every other store by around 30% on pretty much every comparable item. Overall, stores making 0.5% profit simply doesn't add up. We've got more new chains moving in to the area, existing stores moving (merely half a mile away for access to better demographics), and this is all costing tens of millions in construction alone. Note: I realize that other regions may have store closures to balance this out too - some areas boom, others shrink.

I can not believe multi-billion companies would be putting up tens/hundreds of millions to chase after these minuscule (and apparently shrinking) profit margins. Maybe I'm wrong. Or perhaps this meme of "grocery stores never make a profit!" is wrong, or at least overblown. A quick check up of a regional store indicates their net profit is somewhere around 2.3% of sales volume - not stellar, but not terribly close to 0.5% either.

EDIT: bit more info/breakdown on the subject: https://thegrocerystoreguy.com/what-is-the-profit-margin-for...

EDIT 2: FWIW, on your $200 example, the company making 'only' $1, it's probably more like $4-$5, but that's after all other expenses (labor, inventory, insurance, advertising, etc) is factored in.

Lidl is probably coming in and destroying competition by running leaner operations with less payroll due to not having to deal with legacy unions. It happens and has happens in many businesses (see declining real wages for past few decades for bottom 3 quintiles), but a lot of the “growth” in retail comes from cutting labor costs.

Lidl likely is 'winning' there (if indeed there's legacy union component to their pricing). They also scaled back their expansion plans. The one by us is moderately large, and newer ones (and future planned ones) are (and will be ) smaller.

Within a 3 mile radius, we have a Walmart, Lidl, Aldi, Target, Wegmans, Lowes, Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Lowes, and Harris Teeter (yes, 2 Lowes and 2 Harris Teeters). This is in North Carolina - some of these are regional chains. The Lowes and HT have historically been some of the consistently highest prices for anything, and I'm honestly baffled how people can afford to shop there regularly.

Yes, perhaps keeping a bit more money 'local' (vs that money going out of state) might be a 'good thing', somehow, but it's hard for me to justify it. Perhaps, if there's real benefit, they need to do some better PR. Or perhaps they have, and everyone else 'gets it', and I've just not heard it?

I wanted a bag of frozen cherries. Local HT - 'name brand' was $5.25. HT store brand was ~$4.25. Walmart store brand was ~$3. Target store brand was $1.89. (same sizes for all - all late 2019 prices from memory). I have a hard time justifying spending 100% more for generic brand stuff. Cheeses, milk, bread, cereals, eggs, meats - our local HT is almost always at least 50% more than the Lidl or Target or Walmart. Maybe these disparities aren't as great in other regions, and this will shake itself out eventually?

EDIT: found some HT numbers from a few years ago that indicated their net profit was closer to 3.6%. They also have a profit sharing program, which may account for aiming for a higher profit percent.

[1]https://smallbusiness.chron.com/profit-margin-supermarket-22...

If Walmart started treating their staff like Costco we’d see a lot happier staff, and pay less taxes on entitlements.

If Walmart paid their staff like Costco their prices would be high like Costco’s and there would be little reason for them to exist anymore.

For people on a budget, Costco’s prices are terrible on many basic items. The “bulk prices” in many categories (e.g. dairy) are at best the same price per unit as Walmart with the huge purchase requirement.

Costco is for middle to upper middle class incomes and Walmart is for middle to lower class incomes. If you don’t recognize the price difference between the stores, you are privileged enough to be in the former category.

I would believe that if the Waltons weren’t one of (the?) richest families in the world. They can afford to pay more but don’t as the US taxpayer is making up the difference in welfare.

Privatize the profit, socialize the cost.

Estimated Walton family wealth is $250 bill. Walmart employs 2.2 million people. Pay them all $10k more per year and the Walton wealth would be gone after a decade (ignoring the fact that losing money for years in a row would eliminate the Walton wealth much faster due to stock declines).

Walmart’s model is just not sustainable at Costco level pay.

> They can afford to pay more but don’t as the US taxpayer is making up the difference in welfare.

If you don’t like that people can get welfare on minimum wage, either eliminate welfare at that wage level or raise the minimum wage until people who make minimum wage don’t qualify.

> Privatize the profit, socialize the cost.

It is the government who decides to pay welfare at these levels. If you want to ban people from making money at those hourly rates, go ahead. But this is not a case of “socialize the cost” because being a Walmart employee making $25k + welfare is still better than being unemployed and just getting welfare.

I got that at Safeway on Market/Church in SF. But in other places I've seen Walmart and other stores' staff have been much happier and nicer. Even though these chains try to have consistent experiences across locations, there is a pretty large variability from city to city.

There’s still the whole, all very poor people shop there dynamic that isn’t going away unless someone can undercut Walmart significantly.

I almost never find an old employee at Costco, while at Walmart most of them are old or middle aged.

Though it might also be that nearly every piece of stock at a Costco will be significantly heavier than that at Walmart, making it difficult for older people who might have more in the way of back problems etc to work there.

I think it has to do with lot of older people shopping at Walmart so they feel comfortable around others. Don't know.

If I'm at a Whole Foods, the sensitivity is way at the other extreme of politeness. I wonder if anyone's ever went deep on an analysis of this sort of phenomenon.

Macy's has a similarly annoying policy. They deliberately keeping their cash registers unmanned, which they apparently tell their employees is to "avoid intimidating customers" so you have to stand around waiting or seek out an employee manually. I thought my local Macy's was simply understaffed, but since learning they do it on purpose I've decided never to go there again.

Tangentially related. In college or football team would go to old country buffet. Which has a microphone in the wall to order more from the kitchen for the staff. One of our smart ass players went up and said "we need more fried chicken". The manager caught him and scolded him. Then looked at the buffet and said "make that two orders of fried chicken" in the mic.

The store is just like a Vegas casino, every last thing has been thought out and everything is A/B tested down to a regional and sometimes city basis.

If all of their changes are focused on near-term bottom line, is it really surprising if that comes at the expense of customer/employee satisfaction and brand reputation?

Fixed income customers see things like an ultra clean speed and efficient store as 1) intimidating and 2) overhead that makes prices go up and "wastes" their money.

I can understand e.g. when I buy a TV, but a gallon of milk is ridiculous and profiling.

Any employee that stops you might be guilty of kidnapping.

https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/consumer-protection/prote...

I would much rather stop for 30 seconds than be banned from my local grocery store.

Worst case is they call the local PD who are having a bad day and want to point a gun at a black man

#7 is a separate issue though. That is a predatory practice and I'm glad I live in a state where it isn't allowed.

They're also the only store I know of that shuts down their checkouts at closing time; if you were already in line, too bad, they'll check you out tomorrow. (Of course, a lot of their stores are 24x7)

I'm still debating the merits of growing up on a Rez versus how I see my fellow humans.

Only time I see that much concentrated sadness in a store, that consistently, is when I find myself in a dying-rural-town grocery store that looks like it time-travelled from 1990. I don't remember whether those were sad places when I was growing up, mostly in those same sorts of dying rural towns. Wal-Mart wasn't, and their store function, service, cleanliness, and design all improved constantly through about '05, then abruptly reversed course and haven't stopped going downhill. Dunno what happened. Maybe Amazon happened, though that doesn't explain some of their oddly ill-looking paint color choices from the last couple re-designs.

I’ve noticed this at Walmart. However, I’ve noticed it’s worse at Target, (an arguably higher end store) where I’ve observed the queue reaching from one end of the store to the next. Interestingly, I’ve also noticed this effect on grocery chains in my area. Fry’s (Kroger) seems to have many queues open, which go quickly, whereas the higher end Safeway will have 1-2 queues open and zero open after hours.

All stores are bad with lines, until you get to really high end (like Whole Foods or Natural Grocers), but Paradoxically the more expensive stores (mid range, like Target and Safeway) are the worst offenders out of everyone. I don’t know why this is. Maybe they don’t have enough customers and not enough profit to justify more staff, or maybe they found that if the lines are long, customers will make another trip around the store and buy more stuff.

That said, it used to be, before the self-checkout area. And, when traveling, I end up popping in to Walmarts in various parts of the country now and then, and the checkout times are always a gamble.

re: #6 - I wonder if it has something to do with the aisles being there more for the convenience of the packers and movement of goods in the store, vs the convenience of shoppers. I understand your point, and do notice it sometimes, and have tried to compare it to other shops. However, in the last few years, I found myself going to shops less and less overall, so it's harder for me to remember and compare against competitors fairly.

Nothing about your list describes Walmarts in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, except perhaps the poorest parts of Dallas, which I have not personally visited.

Grapevine, Flower Mound, Roanoke, Rome, Keller, Preston Hollow Walmarts are all immaculately maintained and clean.

I'm currently working on robotics deployment for several new Amazon warehouses and I hate having to visit the already operating ones - everyone looks like they would jump out of the window like the people at Foxconn, except they don't because they know the fall wouldn't kill them.

Amazon is truly staffed with geniuses at the upper echelons... keep the peasants who make the whole operation work away from the customers, that way the customers can always feel good about buying from Amazon. Walmart doesn't have that luxury, what with it's enormous physical presence and all.

"Wow, [mid-tier jeans brand] is only $16/pair at Wal-Mart, and they're $40 when you find them on sale on [jeans brand]'s web site. What a bargain!"

... but then it turns out they're not the same thing, even if they're made to look very much like they are even down to the labelling, and in fact the manufacturer produces a separate low-end- and outlet-stores version that's much worse than their standard product.

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This is actually an anti-pattern in their org;

They have FAILED to properly train to and address this problem, thus it persists.

Its not intentional - it is through lack of taking a focus on this aspect of their business, or looking at it - and determining they prefer/dont mind it...

Brilliant turn of phrase!

Sorry you have to mix with the “rabble”!

People want to shop with others of similar taste/preferences. They presently cater to the one of the lowest common denominators (Dollar stores could be lower, I guess), so how could they appeal to other shoppers?

That’s the crux of the question. The current stores appeal to one audience but not another.

Whole Foods has the same problem, except from the other direction. Working class folks will sneer at Whole Foods. It’s not their bag. Amazon would have to open something that caters to price conscious shoppers if they wanted to expand groceries to working class shoppers...

Furthermore, I'm wondering what shitholes these people live in or near where they actually experience this sort of thing.

The Walmarts around Keller, Texas are nothing like what's being described here... although granted, this is an upper middle class area of Texas, and unlike California, we don't allow people to steal shit out of our pharmacies with impunity, nor do we allow people to shit on our streets.