Wal-Mart taking a page from Target - Enhancing store experience

Wal-Mart's "Project impact" to enhance store experience - Blogging stocks


Walmart's (WMT) new "Project Impact" plans to enhance the store experience as a way to retain those consumers who have found the big-box retailer a money-saving haven for over a year while the U.S. was mired in recession.

This isn't just planogram changes, though: Walmart is lowering shelf heights (to greatly increase in-store visibility), is getting rid of the pallet clutter commonly seen in most Walmart supercenters and is increasing its food offerings.

Will any of this matter to those who just want low prices on anything in retail, whatever the experience may be? Perhaps -- but that's not the target here. Those consumers who "traded down" to Walmart as a belt-tightening tactic are the target. They are shopping at Walmart now, and the company wants to keep them there as much as possible as the economy improves and income protection and spending becomes less a priority.

Is Walmart taking a page from Target's (TGT) playbook? I've said for years that Target's shopping experience is on a different playing field from the Walmart experience. Target stores are brighter, cleaner, easier to navigate and resemble a department store instead of Walmart's "warehouse" experience. Finally, Walmart may have gotten the message. It can't continue growing organically in a market where it's nearly saturated; it needs to steal consumers from the competition and keep them. And, the timing could not be better; customers clearly abandoned Target in the past 12 months for Walmart's cheaper prices (compare the financials for proof), and now the world's largest retailer wants to psychologically handcuff these new consumers to its stores.

Walmart may downplay the changes as minor, but this is the biggest change in merchandising for the company in the past decade. A decade that was very generous to Walmart's coffers.