Slashdot Mirror
Wal-Mart Threatens Studios Over iTunes Sales
Y-Crate writes "It seems Wal-Mart is threatening retaliation against studios who decide to offer movies on iTunes. The Bentonville, AR retailer seems a bit miffed that someone would dare to undercut their prices. This wouldn't be the first time they've turned on a supplier for dealing with Apple." From the article: "Last year when Disney announced it would begin offering episodes of the hit shows 'Lost' and 'Desperate Housewives' on Apple's iTunes, the reaction of the world's largest retailer sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry. Wal-Mart, worried that offering the shows for viewing on iPods would cut into DVD sales at its stores, sent 'cases and cases' of DVDs back to Disney, according to a source familiar with the matter."
So studios that sell movies through iTunes get boycotted by the 500lb Retailer but studios that sell movies through Amazon's Unbox are fine.
Either they aren't particularly worried about Amazon being a threat or they have it in for Apple.
from everything I've read, Walmart has a lot of cutting edge large system/enterprise technology and it staff,
Why can't they handle this kind of distribution model? they have a music store, they have a on-line photo gifts store- they have-- gosh -every feature amazon has except panache...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I can't help feeling that the studios should call the Wal-Mart bluff here.
Wal-Mart may hate the idea and threaten and moan, but if all the studios jump onto the iTMS then Wal-Mart will buckle. They can't drop their entire DVD line unless they want to drop a whole market.
The power rests with the studios here, but they're scared.
I agree with that, my wife and I used to always shop at Walmart Supercenters because we thought it was cheaper. We had been shopping at Kroger and going to Walmart just for items we couldn't get at Kroger. But I started to notice that Walmart's prices were different for the same items every time we came. We buy diapers, wipes, and we used to buy formula. On those three items the prices would vary by a few cents to 1.00 with each visit, almost randomly. Sometimes higher, sometimes lower. I started looking around the rest of the store on visits and noticed it was happening to many items we bought and sometimes our visits were more expensive than if we just went to Kroger and a nearby Target for the rest. Also, items marked 'Rolled back' are sometimes more expensive than they were the last week. Weird, isn't it?
Target seems a little higher priced, but their prices stay the same, rather than changing from day to day, or they don't do it as frequently and I don't notice it. Now we just shop at our Kroger and Target and we buy only diapers and nothing else from Walmart because you can't trust their prices.
I also don't like them strongarming companies like this or how badly they pay their workers. I also know people who work there or who have and the managers will fire you if you don't check enough people per hour, or don't do various other things as fast as you can, and they pay so low the workers have to take Medicare because they can't afford the prices on the more expensive policies. Walmart is definitely wrong for America. Their low prices gimmick is a sham and at some point this company will have to act more ethical, I hope. Shame on you, Walmart!
We've seen this before every time a new process or invention has threatend to make an old way of doing business obsolete, and we'll see it every time it happens in the future. People smashed looms when they were introduced, because they put people out of work; people here have moaned and wailed about offshoring; the recording industry wails about electronic distrribution of media; now a bricks and mortar retailer is threatening suppliers over a perceived threat to its current way of making money.
Distribution channels have nothing to do with it; it's all about money and a perceived threat to someone's way of making it. "The more things change, the more they stay the same..."
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Anyone remember the days when Sam Walton was alive? MADE WITH PRIDE IN THE USA! You used to see that all over the store... there was an entire movement based on this, it wasn't just a Wal-Mart thing. My father's textile manufacturing company was part of this as well. Don't need to tell you that his business went under a few years back. Anyway, go through Wal-Mart today. Made with pride in the USA? What a joke! Poor Sam must be rolling over in his last-ever-made-in-America pine box. Wal-Mart has gone so China that as an entity Wal-Mart is China's #4 buyer of goods... Wal-Mart, in a top ten list of COUNTRIES, comes in at #4. And if you think Wal-Mart plays hardball with suppliers here... In China the labor movement doesn't exist; workers rights, workers comp (ha!) and such don't exist. Lose an arm... so sorry, no job for you. Given those conditions one can only imagine what factories, suppliers to Wal-Mart, do when Wal-Mart says lower prices. If there were two factories that made plastic bowls and both wanted to sell to Wal-Mart. The cost cutting, the near slave labor conditions that would emerge to give one factory an "edge" can't paint a pretty picture. To think that Wal-Mart actually influences working conditions and helps to suppress rights and compensation for workers in China is dreadful. Made with pride in the USA? Hardly.
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
Only if you make cheap junk; if you produce a high-quality product and are not willing to make compromises, then Wal-Mart is not your retail outlet.
Here is a good story about how the CEO of Snapper stood up to Wal-Mart - http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapp er.html
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
As for "What percentage of the US is really so cut off from civilization that if Wal-Mart doesn't carry "Lost" they can't get it some other way?", well I happen to have done some travellign around my state recently (Pennsylvania) and in alot of small towns all there is to buy such things (heck most things) from is Wal-Mart! Wal-Mart killed the mom & pop stores there and no big companies want to come play there, so Wal-Mart is it... For just about everything.
The sad part is most people don't seem to care... I needed to get gas while driving through one small city (about 6-9k people live there) and since all I'd seen whiel coming through town to shop at was a Wal-Mart, I aksed if their was anywhere else to pick up a few items. The reply was "Why would we need anything except Wal-Mart? They carry everything we'd ever need." It took cities with a population of at least 20k people to interest most other bussiness to be there and this still didn't offer much choice (2 large chain stores, isn't much better than 1). A significant portion of my state is filled with little sub-20k pop cities (I'd guess upwards of 60% of the state in area), figuring the same thing holds true for areas I didn't pass through while travelling around that's alot of people beholden to Wal-Mart for all there needs...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
As very nearly every product supplier to Walmart has found out, they throw their weight around. You sign on thinking you are going to make a profitable access to the market. Then they come back throwing weight around. Shortly you as a supplier have your profit margin (The reason you are in business) squeezed to zero and below. You can't make this up in margin. Shortly if you don't cave entirely, they find another supplier. If you cannot sustain, you go broke. This is no formula for profits. It is the formula to go broke. Walmart of course profits all the way to your funeral or bankruptsy.
I have some good news. Dollar General Store is about to slit their throat. Dollar store is locating in areas where Walmart lives and eating out their roots. Dollar store is paying their help and giving them benefits like insurance. Dollar store is serving their customers and I can already see that Walmart is headed for the ropes. You can only slit the throat of your suppliers for so long. Then you go broke too!
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Slightly of topic, but reminds me of In'n'Out Burger. They pay decent wages to their employees, health benefits are the rule and what surprised me most: They use neither freezers, nor microwave ovens. The produce is delivered fresh, every day.
Tasting such a burger is an epiphany. When you order it with onions, for example, you bite into a real onion and not into some fuzzy crap, designed by a food lab.
Now, the surpising thing, acording to Fast Food Nation, The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is the fact that In'n'Out Burger is highly profitable, even though their prices are quite reasonable.
To me this proves that you don't have to fuck your suppliers, employees and ultimately customers left right and center in order to turn a buck. This is somewhat encouraging in a world where greed and cheap seem to turn more and more into religious mantra.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Costco, also.
Costco, in terms of how they treat their employees, and how they negotiate with suppliers, is the anti-walmart.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
They are also able to lower costs by shipping en masse to this facility rather than shipping to a bajillion homes directly or a lot of separate stores, and there's other benefits in centralization that reflect in the costs, both to them and to you.
These benefits are not unique to Wal-Mart, which is, after all, why they are neither the first nor last retail chain. They've merely been the most successful.
Retail stores add plenty of value for the consumer. Do-nothing middlement would be the ones between Wal-Mart and the relevant factories, and I'd lay money the number of those has been undergoing a dramatic decrease in the past decade.
Given how screwed your understanding of business is in the first twenty or so words, I'm not even going to begin to try to take apart the rest of your message. I merely invite you to put your clearly awesome business skills to the test someday.
This is the same company that has the "integrity" to take a guitar, and where it flat-out says on the box "Suggested Retail Price $99" and mark it up to $129. They have no reason to bitch about other companies beating their "low prices" when they can't even hide the fact they're over-charging you. Fuck Wal-Mart and anyone associated with them.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Wal-Mart is a monopsony, not a monopoly. It's theoretically not supposed to ever happen, unlike monopolies, which can exist quite readily in industries that have high costs to entry, are rapidly emerging markets, etc.
Monopsonies are when one buyer has all or an unusually high portion of the market. Monopolies refer to one seller having all or an unusually high portion of the market.
In theory, a monopsony shouldn't be able to exist for long, because in a free and efficient market, there will always be someone willing to pay just a little bit more for your product until there are a great number of them buying, thus ending the monopsony. Wal-Mart has found a hole in the market, and has been exploiting it for a long, long time. Their distribution channel efficiencies and unreal growth rate, coupled with the poor management of traditional department stores and other discounters (like KSearsMart), allowed them to build a ridiculous number of stores in areas where there is little to no other competition. It's remarkable when you think about how many large markets (i.e., big cities, like Chicago, New York, LA, San Fran, etc.) that Wal-Mart hasn't been able to get into, while Target and others have, yet they still command the market position from an almost all-rural and suburban penetration.
Is what they do right? Maybe not. Will it eventually bring down the lower ends of economy? If let go, quite possibly - artificially or dramatically and unilaterally dropping consumer good prices and payrolls can have negative effects just like inflation. But would have they been able to get into this position had everyone else done their jobs, cut out such obviously inefficient distribution methods and such? Very unlikely.
If the US had been in a different economic standing in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Wal-Mart was charging, a quick LBO of Kmart or one of the mega-department store chains could have easily fixed this. Kinda reminds of another area with obvious inefficiencies where one economic swing could bring an LBO on - though in the case of Microsoft, leveraging that much would be earth-shattering.
Walmart, unlike the RIAA/MPAA is NOT in any danger whatsoever.
Walmart, worst case, will just stop selling movies if (when?) the 'digital download thing' takes off and surpasses retail sales. Big flipping deal. What' the real issue here? Walmart frees up a few hundred square feet in a 100,000 sq foot store which they can fill with:
Q-tips, Toothpicks, Bathroom scales, Can-openers, Kids shoes, String, Universal Remote Controls, Watering Cans, Aspirin, Spoons, USB cable, Coca-Cola, Ker-Plunk, Pregnancy Test Kits, Bicycles, and ten billion other items that will never be delivered as digital downloads...
A few years ago Walmart forced Rubbermaid to close down US plants and begin manufacturing overseas. Now this wasn't because people were not buying Rubbermaid goods. They did this at a time when Rubbermaid was extremely profitable and people were more then willing to buy their products as priced.
However, Rubbermaid became reliant on Walmart for distribution, and Walmart wanted cheeper supply. At first Rubbermaid wouldn't fold, but then Walmart stopped carrying Rubbermaid products. By doing that Walmart almost crushed an incredibly successful company. Rubbermaid has since outsource manufacturing and, as I recall, now have products back in Walmart stores.
Among other things, they've done also done this with "tipper stickers" and "clean" CDs.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"