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Comment by gurumeditations | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

Walmart is not a monopoly at all.

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