Walmart Case Study

Courtney Haines

IB 303

Case Study 1

Is Wal-Mart Good for America?

What was noticeable in the Wal-Mart shareholders meeting is that it’s like a high school pep rally. Several adults are showing their support to Wal-Mart. The shareholders’ meeting was about the market and sales of the company. Shareholders gloated on wealth and size of Wal-Mart compared to other companies like IBM, Hewitt Packer, Dell and Microsoft. This type of meeting is different because of how powerful Wal-Mart is in the business and economy world. At a regular shareholders’ meeting for another company they would review strategies, marketing and etc for the company in an organized style. Wal-Mart has the same concept but they result in a pep rally.

Wal-Mart is able to keep track of its inventory by using a Telxon unit which scans the merchandise and tracks the sales, trend spikes, inventory down to when it was bought and size. Telxon system generates orders to the specifications of the trends of the items that were scanned and is filled by midnight to restock the shelves. The system can also track the price of the item and the rate of which the item is sold to determine the future price of the item. It is hard on the producers to meet the orders required to stock the store the following day. The manufactures would have to speed up the product production, ship their inventory sooner to meet Wal-Mart’s demands.

There are many factors that contributed the decline of Rubbermaid. Because of the price of resin skyrocketing, manufacturers saw that the cost to create Rubbermaid products increased significantly. This forced them to charge retailers more, in order to keep their profits standard. Wal-Mart wouldn’t accept this price increase, therefore they slowly decreased the amount of Rubbermaid products they carried. This is because they didn’t want to have to pay more money for the same products. Finally, after Newell bought Rubbermaid, al assets were sold and thousands of jobs were lost....