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Comment by indigodaddy | Hacker News Reader

So. I’m a little surprised that if Walmart has had this plan in the works for some time, why did they sell off Vudu? Why not leverage that somehow into a service included with Walmart Plus, if not only to include just the Vudu free-with-ads stuff initially. Just rebrand it into Walmart Plus.. Wouldn’t this have helped to compete with Prime more? Then they could include the paid Vudu stuff just as video results-to-purchase inside of Walmart.com, much like Amazon does, to drive more users and purchases of the Vudu paid content, but basically all rebranded to Walmart Video content inside of Walmart.

They must have explored this idea yeah? How could they not have? I guess that Vudu was just too valuable for cash and was a good time to sell?

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In an organization this big the right hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing.

It would seemingly make sense. Although I question whether anyone actually gets prime because of the streaming.

It certainly makes the decision to continue paying for Prime easier. If it was just fast free shipping, I'd have to add up how much I was saving (or spending extra) every year.

But throw in the next season of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and I no longer really care. That show is that good.

If you’ve ever worked for Walmart, you’ll realize they’re #1 because they’re a monopoly, not because they’re particularly smart.

But they weren't the first. They got to be number one by being very smart. Whether they can remain smart enough to stay number one is a different story.

Walmart is not a monopoly at all.

I'd argue they are smart. I shop a lot at Wal-mart, but rarely step in the store. I shop online, do their free grocery pickup and their in-store (non-grocery) pickup. The last one is technically walking into the store, but the non-grocery pickup is just inside the front door, so I'm not really going to the main part of the store. Plus, the times I do go into the store, they have a really nice automated checkout with a lot of stations. In my experience, Wal-mart automated checkouts are the smoothest and least likely to be broken compared to other stores I've used automated checkout at. Wal-mart does a great job getting my business without requiring me to actually interact with their employees and other customers or wait significant amounts of time for anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

Walmart has competitors in every market I've seen. Small towns seem to be more likely to have chain dollar stores than a Walmart.

In my small city of 50k, Walmart doesn't exclusively cover any category other than maybe toys. There are other grocery stores, other automotive stores, other clothes stores, jewelry, drugs, blah blah. You go to Walmart because it's cheap, not because it's the only option.

It's not that Walmart is the cheapest place, as you mention dollar chain stores are usually available, but Walmart offers a wide selection of goods, at reasonably cheap prices, at a level of quality which is typically not terrible.

So if the question is where do I go to get some random item where it won't break immediately and I won't overpay, Walmart seems like a reasonable choice.

Of course, Walmart is not alone in the category of wide selection, reasonably cheap, not terrible quality, Target comes to mind, and I think Kohls too, although I rarely go there so I might be wrong about that. Anyone know any others?

So I agree Walmart is not a monopoly, even if you are looking for apples-to-apples comparisons it is not unique.

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