Walmart and the Multichannel Trap
Walmart and the Multichannel Trap
In February 1991, the very month that Walmart overtook the most iconic American retailer in sales , Sears spokesman Jerry Buldak told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the companies couldn’t really be compared:
“We feel the mission of Sears is to be an integrated, powerful specialty merchant, with brand names and our own lines of exclusive merchandise,” company spokesman Jerry Buldak said. “We feel that distinguishes us from other retail specialty stores or discount chains.”
No other retailer, he said, offers customers as much under one roof: insurance and other financial services, Sears’ own credit-card operation, with more than 28 million customers, and a nationwide repair network to service merchandise.
Twenty-five years later the solipsism of Buldak’s statement remains remarkable, especially since Sears’ demise had been set in motion 29 years earlier.
1962 was perhaps the most consequential year in retailing history: in Ohio the five-and-dime retailer F.W. Woolworth Company created a new discount retailer called Woolco; S.S. Kresge Corporation created Kmart in Michigan; the Dayton Company opened the first Target in Minnesota; and Sam Walton founded the first Walmart. All four were based on the same premise: branded goods didn’t need the expensive overhead of mass merchandisers, which meant prices could be lower. Lower prices served in turn as a powerful draw for customers, driving higher volumes, which meant more inventory turns, which increased profitability.
Sears, which had introduced a huge number of those brands to America’s middle class, 1 first through their catalog and then through a massive post-World War II expansion into physical retail, was stuck in the middle: higher prices than the discounters, but much less differentiation than high-end department stores. By the time Buldak gave his statement the company’s fate as an also-ran was sealed, even though no one at Sears had a clue: Buldak’s stated mission of being “an integrated, powerful specialty merchant, with brand names and our own lines of exclusive merchandise” failed to consider whether customers gave a damn.
Walmart in the Middle
There is certainly an echo of history in Amazon’s rise; over time the one-time bookseller has developed a dominant strategy that resembles Sears in its heyday: lower prices and better selection, and over the past few years especially, incredible convenience. Walmart has felt the pain for a while, at least in its stock price: Amazon overtook the largest retailer in market cap last summer, just in time for Walmart’s sales to flatten or even drop; in May the company reported a 1.1% decline in year-over-year same store sales in the U.S., the fourth poor quarter in a row.
Walmart is stuck in a new middle, surrounded not just by old competitors like Target, but new ones like Kroger (groceries have provided much of Walmart’s recent sales growth), deep discounters like Aldi, club-based retailers like Costco, and convenience-focused drugstores. Looming above all of them, though, is Amazon.
Walmart, which launched its first online site back in 1999, has consistently told investors it can handle the threat. In the clearest articulation of a strategy that has been repeated on earnings calls ad nauseum, then-CEO of Walmart.com in the U.S. Joel Anderson told investors on a 2011 analyst call :
One of our key pillars of digital success and differentiation will be about building a continuous channel approach. Specifically, I’d like to share with you the progress we have made in 3 areas to leverage our multichannel for the U.S. business.
The first of those areas is around the idea of assortment. It is our role online to extend that shelf in the stores. The offline merchants here in Bentonville set the strategy, and then it’s our job to broaden that assortment…
Secondly, I want to focus on access. Several pilots are currently in place to leverage our ship-from-store capabilities. We will offer next-day delivery at a very economical price. We will use these capabilities to reach customers in urban areas that we have not yet penetrated.
The third area is fulfillment. We already have unlimited assets in place, nearly 4,000 stores, over 150 DCs. This will give us the flexibility to offer our customers best-in-class delivery options.
For example, last week, we transitioned several disparaged shipping offers into one comprehensive fulfillment program. We are now offering 3 compelling free shipping programs. This is an excellent example of multichannel strategy beginning to come to life.
The fulfillment program Anderson went on to describe was ridiculously complex: “fast” shipped anything online to your local store, “faster” shipped a smaller selection to your house, while “fastest” made an even smaller selection available for pickup the same day. Anderson concluded:
“Fast, faster, fastest. What a great example of a continuous channel experience that cannot easily be replicated.”
What a positively Buldakian statement! Of course such an experience “cannot easily be replicated”, because who would want to? It was, like Sears’ “socks-to-stocks” strategy, driven by solipsism: instead of starting with customer needs and working backwards to a solution, Walmart started with their own reality and created a convoluted mess. Predictably it failed.
The Multichannel Trap
The problems with Walmart’s original approach were threefold:
- It was confusing: “Fast faster fastest” and its various iterations put all of the onus on customers to figure out what worked best for them, and for which items. Why, though, should customers bother? If they want to buy something in person, go to Walmart. If they want it delivered, go to Amazon. You know exactly what you will get from both experiences (which, by extension, favors Amazon in the long run).
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