Walmart could have a huge competitive advantage if they advertised that they don’t commingle stock and made it easy to only order shipped and sold by Walmart.com.
Although, Walmart also is known for accepting lower quality goods from brands in order to sell them at lower price, which isn’t much different from counterfeits, so I still wouldn’t buy from them.
This is the primary reason I don't shop at Walmart. Almost everything you find in their stores, save for grocery and branded household supplies, is of inferior quality.
"Snapper is the sort of high-quality nameplate, like Levi Strauss, that Wal-Mart hopes can ultimately make it more Target-like. He suggested that Snapper find a lower-cost contract manufacturer. He suggested producing a separate, lesser-quality line with the Snapper nameplate just for Wal-Mart. Just like Levi did."
The book "The United States of Walmart" goes into how Walmart pressures manufacturers to lower price points, margins, outsource, etc to meet the price Walmart wants to sell their products at. They have done significant damage to once reputable brands like Levis and Huffy in the interest of having that premium brand in their stores.
For much of the 90s and early 2000s offshoring of manufacturing in the US was primarily driven my Walmart demanding lower per unit prices. Manufacturers had little choice but to comply since not being in Walmart meant losing out on a majority of the market.
Maybe this is a result of what you describe but I never remember Levis or Huffy being premium brands. Before Walmart "came to our town" those brands were featured in other big-box stores.
Maybe premium is the wrong word. Levis and Huffy were never designer brands, they were the standard in quality. Like Tide Detergent, Heinz Ketchup or Coca Cola, they were brand to beat.
The pattern seems to happen many brands over time that sell out or fail. You see it across markets with brands like Packard Bell, Kodak, Polaroid, Martha Stewart, Kate Spade, RCA, etc.
50 years ago if you had a Zenith or RCA TV it was a sign of quality, 10 years ago you'd be mocked. Before the turn of the century Philips was known for consumer electronics and even made videogame consoles, now they make lightbulbs.
True, but this isn't Wal Mart's fault, it's China's fault.
For instance, half a dozen Japanese electronics manufacturers tried to sell televisions, a business that the Japanese have dominated for 40 years.
Half of them threw in the towel. People buy on price; nobody was going to pay a 25% premium for a Pioneer or a JVC TV.
At the same time, Chinese companies like TCL began gobbling market share.
I'm typing this on a "Silo" TV that I bought at Fry's about five years ago. When I bought it, I figured it would be junk, but it was so cheap I couldn't resist.
Five years later, it's still going strong.
Silo is still selling TVs (cheaply) and Pioneer is gone from the market.
I had my projection TV fixed by a local repairman about 10 years ago. He told me the new Chinese TV's were not repairable as most don't have any parts, or mechanisms available to facilitate a repair.
A few years later we bought a "premium" LCD TV rated highly on Consumer Repots which broke less than 2 years later. We replaced with a cheapy, for 1/2 the price and it's already lasted longer. Even if it didn't (which was expected), I could buy 3x the cheap TVs for the same price.
> True, but this isn't Wal Mart's fault, it's China's fault.
It was Walmart that drove manufacturing to China. Walmart wanted name brands and dictated the price point at which they were willing to buy those brands. When the manufacturers did the numbers they realized that they could only service Walmart if they outsourced.
The companies setup factories in China and basically showed the Chinese how to make the products. Eventually the Chinese started to produce competing products that were at first inferior but have gradually gotten better.
This is relatively common for big box stores, not just Walmart. Manufacturers might produce retailer specific SKUs to sell at different price points, cutting features or perhaps using lower quality parts.
For example, you might get a TV that shares the same model name, but has multiple SKUs, one of which has fewer HDMI ports or uses panels with a higher dead pixel tolerance.
A lot of retailers and manufacturers do this. It's not so much that the products are inferior, just different. A lot of times it's tricking you into thinking you're getting something you're not, occasionally it's to offer a better exclusive version.
Sometimes it's a TV with a lower spec panel or limited I/O, other times it'll be something like a Laptop with a smaller harddrive and less ram to drive the price point down.
It can go the other direction too, where the spec is bumped. Roku makes versions of their Streaming Box that are only available at Walmart. They're not inferior, they're just configurations you can't get elsewhere. The Express+ is a Walmart only version of their crappiest STB with their premium remote, because the basic remote sucks.
This happens a lot at places that do price matching because it's then impossible to say you found a product elsewhere because it literally is only sold in their store.
I can give you a specific example. Hanes T-shirts, for use as under shirts. They version you get at Walmart is thinner fabric, the seams are single stitched, not double. My understanding is that Walmart usually sets the price for these kinds of things and it is up to the vendor to make a version they can sell at that price and make money.
I actually like the thinner fabric undershirts. My issue with the one's I've bought from walmart is there's basically no consistency. I bought the v-neck versions to wear under a button up shirt, and had to turn half of them into rags because necks were so wide/deep.
There are a couple examples here of products that appear to be the same, but aren't quite the same.
I also remember reading about a lawnmower manufacturer that was forced to use plastic parts (the deck, IIRC) instead of metal to reduce cost to sell at Walmart. I couldn't find that article now, though. I read it years ago.
Although, Walmart also is known for accepting lower quality goods from brands in order to sell them at lower price, which isn’t much different from counterfeits, so I still wouldn’t buy from them.