Wal-Mart meeting may bring changes
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. filled the Kansas City convention center with its store managers and suppliers this past week, the world’s largest retailer kept the discussions about its merchandise and strategies for the coming year a strictly internal matter.
The gathering, an annual event, was particularly important this year because Wal-Mart is struggling to rekindle sales growth. But the company made no announcements from the meeting and did not allow the media to attend, which means that whatever plans its executives laid out for the new year will only be publicly gleaned as Wal-Mart implements them.
“I don’t think we’ll see any major announcements or dramatic overhauling,” said Richard Hastings, vice president and senior retail sector analyst at Bernard Sands.
That might be hard for the millions of Wal-Mart watchers not just across the country but around the world. Because of its sheer size, the decisions it makes on what to sell and how to sell it can have a broad impact — Wal-Mart’s annual sales are greater than those of its next six competitors combined, including Target Corp., Sears Holdings Corp. and Kroger Co. By the company’s reckoning, 84 percent of American households shop there at least once a year.
“What Wal-Mart does has an impact on everybody in this country, because even if you don’t shop there, the place you do shop competes with Wal-Mart,” said Charles Fishman, author of “The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works and How It’s Transforming the American Economy.”
And for many manufacturers, Wal-Mart is their biggest customer. Fishman said Wal-Mart’s decisions on what 140,000 or so products go into its Supercenters affect inventory and pricing across the retail sector.
The four-day Kansas City meeting of 7,000 store managers and hundreds of suppliers is where the retailer lays out objectives and merchandise for the year ahead and gets its people and vendors motivated. The convention center’s rooms feature mock-ups of store aisles and displays that will be in its nearly 4,000 stores.
This year’s meeting came as analysts say the company is at a strategic crossroads after reporting its worst holiday season ever, as measured by sales growth at stores open at least a year.
“They’re under pressure to become a lot more like Target,” Hastings said, explaining that Wal-Mart will have to offer trendier styling at Wal-Mart prices to keep up with the faster growing Target.
Wal-Mart has had mixed results from a strategy launched in 2005 that aimed at doing just that. Its attempts to improve its image by selling more stylish clothing and home furnishings have fallen flat, though its push for higher-price electronics like flat-panel TVs has done well.