I assume this is really only going to be worth it on big purchases. It's an interesting inversion of the usual process for discount retailers.

When I was young, my friend's dad managed the K-Mart in our town. In the 70's and early 80's, K-Mart gave a lot of autonomy to store managers to set sale prices and do promotions. He would nearly always have loss-leader sales going for basic stuff like toothpaste and laundry detergent. He assumed that if he could just get customers in the door for toothpaste, they'd buy enough other stuff to make up for the loss. It worked, too. After a while, many people didn't even bother stopping by Target. K-Mart finally forbade loss-leaders in the late 80's, his sales tanked, and he quit to become a buyer for another chain. The K-Mart is still there, but it's a ghost town compared to Target and Wal-Mart.

I wonder if Wal-Mart can pull off the reverse of what my friend's dad did. Could they get people who ordinarily wouldn't think of going to Wal-Mart in the habit shopping there by discounting big things?