When listening to Customers Hurts: Walmart's $1.85 billion Mistake
dailyartifacts.com
dailyartifacts.com
For comparison, line up this chart
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#chart1:s...
with the one in the article...
I guess the test will be whether sales will shoot up when they reverse this policy.
(The article also doesn't say anything about whether they tested this approach in some stores before converting all stores; Walmart has a long history of mining their sales data to try to pick out patterns in store performance, so if this was done as abruptly as the article says, I'm surprised.)
I think, reading between the lines, that Wal-mart has the data which says that a significant number of remodeled stores flipped negative, where a significant amount of other stores did not. As you say, they have been doing this for a long time.
The one (and only) reason I ever shop at Walmart vs. Target, is because Target has a horrible selection. They never have what I am looking for. Wal-mart usually did, even if it was cluttered. Don't get me wrong, I hate a cluttered store. But I'll shop in a cluttered store that has what I want, vs. a pristine Target-lookalike, that doesn't.