Walmart Structure

Wal-Mart’s structure

Leslie Morales

MBA 572

Dr. Drake

6.21.2010

Wal-Mart Structure

Wal-Mart is one of the biggest corporations that run a chain of large discount stores. As Wal-Mart grew to be the largest corporation many people started to worry about what kind of affect Wal-Mart would have in their community, especially small towns that operates many “Mom and Pop” stores. According to Stone (1997) some small towns can lose almost half of their retail trade within ten years of a Wal-Mart store opening (p.2). Wal-Marts power is resulted from their size and the amount of influence that comes with it. Do you think that Wal-Mart really cares for small town companies and if cities/counties jobs lose money? Personally I don’t think so, as long as the company is making its profit Wal-Mart is just fine with the way things are.

Wal-Mart’s business strategy is more of a low cost management. They really don’t do anything different from their competitors like Target and Kmart but they do offer the lowest prices. Wal-Mart has so much authority with their suppliers that they can command the prices they want in order to squeeze out more savings for the customers. One thing that sets Wal-Mart apart from other companies is how they manage their relationship with their suppliers. Because Wal-Mart is such a large corporation that suppliers who have an account with them is consider important. With that said Wal-Mart has eliminated Supplier Power.

Wal-Mart’s main focus is based on committing to their old slogan, selling a variety of general merchandise at “Low prices. Always.” Wal-Mart doesn’t charge suppliers a slotting fee for the products to appear on the shelf. Instead what Wal-Mart does is focuses on their store managers and asks them to drop unpopular product...