Target’s pickup operation is superior in every dimension. They made the decision to put it front and center, and their employees seem happier. It takes <3 minutes to have a Target person drop stuff in your car, Walmart requires scheduling and is usually late.
The other issue they have is that their logistical operation is best in class for retail, but not so good for shipping.
I've hit their website from Google looking for an item, and the lead time to ship is 2+ weeks and it's highlighted that it's sourced from a partner.
Putting aside the obvious - it's just a worse deal. For most items, they're competing with 1-2 days, a product page packed with verified reviews to help decision making, a company with top notch customer support/return policies and the price is usually the same or cheaper, there's other issues at play too.
It's subtle psychological cues. First, the way they highlight that it's from their partner almost makes it seem like they're doing dropshipping, they don't actually know if it's in stock and I can order and they will put a hold on my credit card. Maybe I'll get it in 2 weeks. Maybe a month. Maybe the order will eventually be cancelled or I will go through a nightmare dealing with their support or having to do a chargeback.
I'm not going through all of that stuff in my head, it's just my mind in the background doing pattern matching with other bad experiences I've had shopping online.
I understand it takes time and truckloads of money to get something even close to what Amazon has, but it also requires good leadership at the executive level.
The one area that Walmart could absolutely crush Amazon in would be picking up your order online, same day. Walmart should be able to leverage all their experience with brick and mortar to do this.
Instead, they're flagging behind Target. Their solution is pretty middle of the road, all the big retailers have something similar.
Amazon bought Whole Foods, so they have a footprint, just like Walmart has an online store. Based on how these companies have executed which do you think happens first? Amazon nails in person pickup or Walmart nails online shopping.
Amazon has nailed free shipping with prime. In person pickup costs money in time, fuel, available vehicle. Feels like checkmate in 2021 but this may change
I bought rope there (in a physical store) a few months ago, for tying down furniture in a truck. Got home, cut the rope, it was a foam core with braiding around it to make it seem like true rope.
This applies to their food items as well, by the way.
Once you get out of the Amazon funnel, why go to Walmart? There’s a hundred retailers that sell genuine KitchenAid mixers. Pick the one with the best price, or color scheme you prefer.
If you want to buy a $150 mixer, but also, say, a $10 book and a $5 cable, you'll be able to put those all in one cart at those vendors and get free postage.
If you go to some specialty mixer retailer, you'll have to buy the other items as a seperate transaction and pay for shipping on them.
I know in my household, we definitely will ask around "I'm buying something from Amazon, so I'll already be spending $25, does anyone want anything else on that order?"
If I buy a product and it has issues—okay, it happens. Maybe I post a bad review or just don’t buy it again.
If I buy a product and it’s something else, the seller should be ashamed of themselves.
I have bought (and returned) countless fraudulent books from Amazon to the point where I had to weigh the books, count the pages, and compare with publishers.
And then I closed my prime membership and I’ll take the longer wait times for a real product.
Have any of the regulators taken note?
I've been reading Congress' anti-trust research and reports. Haven't seen this called out yet.
Companies like Amazon are carefully engineered to avoid that type of enforcement action. Nothing will happen until you have a major political shift - I’d guess somewhere around 2035-2045 when demographics shift the political dynamic in the US.
Not everywhere. I didn't renew my prime subscription a few years ago, because they rarely met their delivery times and I was starting to get broken, counterfeit, and obviously returned/resold items.
I consistently and daily choose no, fuck off and give me the free shipping I’ll wait. If I don’t have enough in my cart for free shipping I wait and add more to my cart later
That said, I know too many people who renew Prime like it was a church tithing. (Yes--I know about their yearly deal.)
It's not movies these people like either. These people love the formulated crap Netflix vomits.
Your post resonated with me because I try hard to avoid any monthly fees for any product. Plus--unless you order a lot, people are just giving Amazon free money.
You just reminded me to cancel Apple storage.
* It’s cheaper for Walmart as it can ride on the back of an existing trunk from a logistics perspective.
* Dependent on how confident you are on stock, Walmart could offer “instant” click and collect on any range in stock in store. This does depend on inventory policies and is more complicated than it initially seems though.
* It gets someone in your store which has an umbrella effect as they are likely to purchase something else.
Most are benefits for Walmart, but the lower delivery cost can be passed on to customers and instant pickup is great for customers when it happens. Furthermore, click and collect is great for people in flats or where leaving a parcel isn’t practical.
I do not see deals anymore. Sure they like to bundle (especially in threes), but the product is usually the stuff that isn't selling elsewhere, and the price isn't much if the consumer divides by 3.
I used to buy there all the time because of the no question asked return policy. That has changed. They question a lot more than electronics returns too.
Oh yea, most high end watches you see in the case are Grey Market bought, and have no manufacturer's warranty.
What's keeping Costco happy is the membership fees. That is pure profit.
Biggest reason I don't go grocery shopping at Walmart. Doing a full cart through a tiny self-checkout area is a PITA.
French ones still run in criminal mode.
I get really miffed at how our system of economics seems set up to destroy rather than promote the common good.
More then a few carts got left half unloaded.
Also recently I started using what I guess is the Swiss (Coop) equivalent of Scan and Go: I scan with my phone in the aisles, but stuff in my bag directly in the aisles as well, and when I leave the list of items I've taken is transmitted to a classic self checkout machine and I just have to pay. I wish I could avoid the machine entirely and pay from my phone, I assume it will exist one day.
The scanning area will have it owns weight sensor for unweighed fruits and vegetables. This scale is usually calibrated/verified by a government body because it relates to pricing. In Europe, it's common to bag and weigh your produce in the produce section, but in N. America, it's integrated with the checkout process.
I live near a Walmart "flagship" store and they are/were testing out a system where you scan items are you pick them and then can bag them in your cart, with a special aisle for exit. I suspect the cart also goes over a scale and they determine if it matches correctly.
Checkout-as-you-go instead of filling your cart and checking out at the end.
Painful for small items or when you have a helper.
Related, Publix is one of the South's top selling points. It's easily the best grocery store I've used. Up until I moved to Florida and experienced Publix, all grocery stores felt more or less the same.
Safeway has managed to piss off every singe one of their employees.
My local Safeway couldn't find help for years.
Since the epidemic, that is changing. They are hiring people who don't care much about conditions, or pay, and I know I'm suspose to say that's great.
Those people will get tired of being treated terribly in the future though.
I bet Safeway is lobbying the state right now to allow booze sales through self-checkout. The only people I see in line waiting five deep is liquor sales.
Plus with contactless payment my shopping is an essentially frictionless walk through the store building.
If you want good customer service go somewhere they dont cut corners on staffing while paying the heroes that have to do 3 people’s jobs minimum wage.
Then take that gaggle to the back in a meeting room so that it's not visible to the customers.
>If you want good customer service go somewhere they dont cut corners
Where does this exist? I'm free this weekend. I'll see about taking a visit to this magical fairy land you speak. /s Seriously though, what public facing retail store doesn't cut corners on staffing or any other aspect? I need to expand my list of stores not on the "disgusted with" list
Food co-ops and independent/small chain grocers. We are fortunate to have a good density of these in the Seattle area and PNW in general.
Maybe they don’t care about offending you? Just a thought.
In my experience, it's rarely as low as 3 minutes. It's often quicker for me to go in and get in line at the customer service.
Is any company in retail any different? Except for the "hire anyone", most people would probably say that describes Amazon.
Huh sounds a bit like another company I happen to know
In a way, it reminds me of "MSFT is Dead" stuff from circa 2008. Google had taken email by storm, was moving on office and seemed to be making web into their own OS. Windows Vista & IE sucked. Google just seemed so much nimbler. Apple had risen from the dead, and was reinventing consumer electronics. MSFT was looking decrepit, the next IBM.
MSFT never panicked. Software was a great business to be in, and the pressure was never financial. Meanwhile, they maintained their own ways and their own cultural advantages, long term perseverance, reverse compatibility, etc.
They didn't win every race. Google won mobile OS, the "browser war. MSFT's attempts at a search business didn't succeed. They did win enough though, plenty. Google was better at web based software earlier, but MSFT held on to Office/Productivity. Office 365 wasn't as slick as early, but it was/is the product businesses will pay for. Most notably, they beat Google on cloud. Cloud was in Google's wheelhouse, and emphatically not in MSFT's. They started late. Google's "paradigm" mentality was great for the early part of the game. Getting where we are today though, that required carrying old paradigms into the new world. It required lots of mess, details, requirements that don't really make sense... That is MSFT's wheelhouse. Meeting companies where they are. Its a foreign concept to Google.
Today, Google is the one that seems weaker. They're plenty rich, and plenty capable technologically. They aren't very good at building businesses though. It's still all about adwords.
MSFT could have gone the way of IBM.
Office 365 just destroys Google Docs, everything MSFT offer just integrated well, is priced well.
Chrome OS + Android + Docs could have been the productivity Windows PC killer if they'd executed it with vision.
Executing well on a new paradigm for a 30 year old suite, maintaining compatibility, etc. These are really hard, and MSFT's speciality. Office became office originally for maintaining meticulous compatibility with its predecessor, Lotus.
It's incredibly tedious, frustrating work. Takes a ton of perseverance. Google docs came out of the gate to oohs and ahs. It was slick. Cool, innovative features like real-time collaboration worked well. MSFT's start was much clunkier, and expectations were already high. It took years before it wasn't an embarrassment. Even then, office 365 was never cool, not even now.
These two companies are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Google likes paradigms, impressive launches. Then, they expect that the paradigm, being better, will just win. Everyone will adapt to their new way. They don't have the belly for years of kludgy, schleppy work while everyone makes fun of them.
Google cloud was a great example of this. It was early. It solved the problems that needed solving, in theory... especially the sexy ones. Everyone just needed to abandon everything they had been doing and come over to the New Way.
This is the exact opposite mentality to the one that maintains badly thought out feature of excel from 1996, itself design to clumsily support Lotus notes features from 1985. A million boring details, technical debt and nothing sexy. Where there's muck there's brass.
I disagree. Office licensing and the whole Microsoft account managament is so incredibly annoying to the point where I prefer the google suite simply because it works. Office recently left me stranded with an outdated license and no way to enable it because the ones in charge were not in office that day, so I went with google, and I'm sticking to it now even though there would be the option to enable to license. I don't want to go through the same hoops and hurdles every 6 months again.
Yes that’s better than bankruptcy but Walmart is a far cry from a successful old incumbent being able to address new upstarts.
Also what makes you say Walmart Labs has great tech and hires top software talent?
A quick look on Glassdoor shows the salary is quite low (esp. as it’s based in San Bruno). I know plenty of new grads that are earning much more, even at non-FANG company. I imagine like most incumbents, Walmart underinvests in tech because they see it as a cost center.
The typical Walmart Labs Software Engineer salary is $116,635. Software Engineer salaries at Walmart Labs can range from $66,567 - $184,513.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walmart-Labs-Software-Engin...
To be fair, they’ve been paying ~ 2% dividend yield that whole time. Still, if your comp is mostly in stock, those dividend payments hurt versus something like a buyback.
If you check the total return price, they're actually doing better than the s&p 500.
total return for walmart: 223% (https://ycharts.com/companies/WMT/total_return_price)
total return for S&P 500: 221% (https://ycharts.com/companies/SPY/total_return_price)
the administration and process involved in setting dividends isn't very trivial either
and too often maintenance of dividend payments are placebos for lackadaisical areas of more important management responsibility
and it's too common for factions in the boardroom to be trying to serve and attract entirely different types of investors who would be better served with tracking stocks or demergers and so on
for some people any dividend unsupported by a very clear rationale is a red light but of course if you are doing in depth company analysis you may have all of this covered in your models and settlement and actions systems.
Something tells me only people who feel insecure about their pay report it to Glassdoor...
Point being, Glassdoor data is so incomplete that I don’t think you can meaningfully compare even two companies on it. Especially if they have different comp structures.
Stick with levels.fyi
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Walmart-Labs/salaries/Softwar...
While their RSUs are not at a FAANG level, the base + bonus are more than in line with top paying companies in CA.
Amazon stopped innovating as a store 5-10 years ago. Nothing has meaningfully changed for the better and things have gotten worse on the front of fake reviews and counterfeit products.
Amazon spent its innovation on AWS, which is not even the same industry Walmart is operating in.
It should have gone the way of sears. Its an abusive business that is bad for everyone.
It was not felt they could yet compete with more well-funded better-established chains. Most stores more closely resembled today's Dollar General than a big box There were not yet "superstores", and most people in big cities had never heard of them.
With IBM PC's not yet having a significant impact on business, and almost nobody doing any data networking compared to today, Wal-Mart already had a fully computerized POS/inventory/logistics-management system in every store, integrated into their headquarters in small-town Arkansas in almost real-time, with data-mining informing the financial decision making.
No one else had anything close, not Sears, Target, or Kmart, who were obviously going to end up having difficulty when Sam thought the time was right for Wal-Mart to come to the big cities.
Even though all these retailers had the same computer hardware in their respective headquarters, IBM's good old "impersonal" mainframes which only big companies could afford.
Walton would bus all his managers to Bentonville for a pow-wow every year, scheduled to start at 8 all week.
If you got there precisely at 8, you had already missed the most important half-hour with Sam, he would start at 0730.
Drove an old pickup truck too, so he could save money.
I would say the only thing that makes them competitive is their price.
That's the entire story of Walmart. Pretty much the only person that smiles is the greeter, and they aren't always very friendly.
I was amazed last year to find Argos, a traditional bricks and mortar catalogue based outlet here in the UK, now offer a good website and next day delivery to most of the mainland, and at competitive prices.
By doing what, clearing out the rest of the local competition?
They can’t just replicate Amazon they have to be better than Amazon.
I wouldn’t say they’re replicating Amazon, they’re a brick and mortar chain with thousands of locations. That’s definitely a potential edge over Amazon.
Amazon just has a superior webpage and shopping experience than all the other major players.
If it’s a big ticket item I might get it from a retail store. But with the recent kohls Amazon return policy I’m slowly changing that behavior as well.
Last I checked, Amazon had removed that option as of maybe a decade ago, and they commingle inventory so they do not assure me of any supply chain integrity.
And they are more expensive for any dense, heavy, especially liquid products.
I never went to Walmart for better quality. Heck that’s why I personally use target more now. Slightly higher price and slightly better quality.
The business could easily have gone the way of Sears.