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Amazon and Walmart Are In An All-Out Price War That Is Terrifying Big Brands (recode.net)
gollum123 quotes a report from Recode: Last month, Walmart gathered some of America's biggest household brands near its Arkansas headquarters for a tough talk. For years, Walmart had dominated the retail landscape on the back of its "Everyday Low Price" guarantee. Walmart wants to have the lowest price on 80 percent of its sales, according to a presentation the company made at the summit, which Recode reviewed. To accomplish that, the brands that sell their goods through Walmart would have to cut their wholesale prices or make other cost adjustments to shave at least 15 percent off. In some cases, vendors say they would lose money on each sale if they met Walmart's demands. Brands that agree to play ball with Walmart could expect better distribution and more strategic help from the giant retailer. And to those that didn't? Walmart said it would limit their distribution and create its own branded products to directly challenge its own suppliers. But this time around, Walmart's renewed focus on its "Everyday Low Price" promise coincides with Amazon's increased aggressiveness in its own pricing of the packaged goods that are found on supermarket shelves and are core to Walmart's success, industry executives and consultants say. The result in recent months has been a high-stakes race to the bottom between Walmart and Amazon that seems great for shoppers, but has consumer packaged goods brands feeling the pressure.
But much more of Amazon (avg maybe $100/month), I hope Wal-Mart at least holds its own. Because Amazon is destroying brick-and-mortar retail across America, which in turn is doing a bad number on both suburban malls and town centers.
During a boom when nearly everybody has a good job, there's plenty of business for both online and brick-and-mortar retailers. But when times are hard, people are counting dollars and Amazon wins that game. Not because they're always cheaper, but because they're cheaper in tactical ways - for example, they drove Tower Records, HMV, and Virgin Records out of business by discounting most pop music titles by 35 percent, only to jack prices back up to near-list after their competitors went out of business. Amazon is ruthless. They're not the consumers' friend, and they're certainly not the workers' friend. But they are very good.
Speaking as as big Amazon spender who does practically no shopping at Wal-Mart brick and mortar or online, the very best thing that can happen is that Wal-Mart will hold their own in this war. One thing we know is that when faced with a virtual monopoly in any field or domain, large corporations will screw over the consumer again and again.
If only we could get this kind of competitive pressure to occur in the healthcare market!
If you even bothered to read the summary, the branded products at Walmart have been given "other cost adjustments". That means they are lower quality products compared to the "same" model at other stores. Walmart is a disease.
Are you willing to risk identity theft with a strip to a store?
Target, Home Depot, TJMaxx/Marshalls, not to mention all the skimmer incidents...they were all huge and pulled from the store info not the online.
Yeah, it sounds easier to hack into the online storefront but there are usually just a couple of servers and all run by relatively well paid and mostly competent IT staff.
There are thousands of branch stores, all setup by competent people but not really well maintained and any trouble shooting is done by either some manager who is fairly clueless about the technology that makes it all work or the young kid in the store who plays the most video games.
Personally, I'll take SSL/TLS over a $15/hour on premise retail employee for security for large chain stores.
Look at a rubbermaid mop bucket at Home depot. Then look at a rubbermaid mop bucket at Walmart. Then tell me their is 'no evidence'.
Walmart is notorious for squeezing so hard, they get a shitty, brand destroying version to sell.
Then you get 'brand destroying' enterprises like MTD mowers and you get a true shitstorm of junk.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The war ended, as the last two humans on Earth, locked in desperate combat, struggled to slay the other, but each succumbed to exhaustion at the same moment.
Peace, then reigned, and goodwill was triumphant.
You rich people talking about 'ethics' and how employees are being mistreated make me laugh. Only rich people care about such things. The poor people that actually have to work at such shit jobs will be happy that they can buy products cheaply no matter where they come from because otherwise they could not buy them at all. It is amusing to see the astroturfers going to war with each other here. Does anyone else really care about this? It's a good thing and lets hope it continues without either side winning. That would be a win for everyone else. A race to the bottom is really a race to the top for everyone else.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Now tha tyou posted those two Rubbermaid buckets, it's easy to see where they cheaped out. Check the strengthener collar at the top, and at the places where the handle is attached. These are "small things", but if you're familiar how plastic reacts to continuous bending, it's obvious the lack of these is going to shorten the lifespan of the bucket significantly. Perhpas not significantly enough for you, but at some point, you will have to spend money on another similar bucket earlier if you buy the Walmart edition.
If you fill up that Walmart edition bucket and lift it up, the weight of the contents is going to make bucket collapse inwards from the points where the handles are attached. This will eventually cause the bucket to fail earlier. The materials are probably cheaper too, which contribute toward early failure even more.
Well yeah, but it's still only a cleaning bucket. You don't expect it to last forever, and you'll probably replace it with something new and shiny long before it outright falls apart anyway. Who cares if the math shows you'll save 50 cents a year on average over the next decade using the good, expensive one instead of repeatedly buying new crappy ones?
That's not to say there aren't areas where quality is important for everyone and buying shitty walmart junk is a terrible, possibly even dangerous idea (many types of sports equipment for instance, bikes especially), but in many cases cheap, generic crap is perfectly serviceable. In fact sometimes the walmart stuff is still more than we really need, which is why dollar stores are a thing.
So you went from WallMart to Amazon as the sole provider of your needs. The old King is dead, long live the new King.
Remember what you said is also vaid for Amazon:
One thing we know is that when faced with a virtual monopoly in any field or domain, large corporations will screw over the consumer again and again.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The problem is, when people live close to the line, they claim that they can't afford to buy the high-quality brand. But they all have the latest smartphone and a big LCD TV.
No, they don't.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Example, I've had the same damn $300 work boots for 5 years!
Which means that, five years ago, you have $300 of disposable income. Meanwhile, someone else who didn't had to spend $40 every six months on cheap boots that fell apart by the end of that time. At the end of the five years, they've spent $400, you've spent $300 and your boots are still fine, but that doesn't help them if they didn't have $300 to spend on boots at any point. To make things worse, they're now had to spend $100 more of their income than you. This is one of the bit reasons why poverty is difficult to escape.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The race to the bottom creates casualties along the way.
While they're busy selling lowest-possible quality products, the acceptable-quality products are losing sales to them. Many times the moderate product lines can't even stay in business, leaving only a few over-the-top/boutique brands for the 1% and the bottom dweller products for everyone else. Once the moderate competition is dead, prices go way up on the poor quality products. So you and I end up with overpriced terrible products with the only alternative being to ridiculously overspend on a luxury product. And few manufacturers want to re-enter the market, because nothing will stop Walmart from simply dropping the prices to anti-competitive levels.
Search for Walmart and Gedney or Walmart and Schwinn for some really tragic stories of good companies being trashed and hundreds of jobs being lost because they tried to do business with Walmart.
One of the funniest differences between men and women: women brag about how new their shoes are, while men brag about how old they are!
While they're busy selling lowest-possible quality products, the acceptable-quality products are losing sales to them. Many times the moderate product lines can't even stay in business, leaving only a few over-the-top/boutique brands for the 1% and the bottom dweller products for everyone else. Once the moderate competition is dead, prices go way up on the poor quality products. So you and I end up with overpriced terrible products with the only alternative being to ridiculously overspend on a luxury product. And few manufacturers want to re-enter the market, because nothing will stop Walmart from simply dropping the prices to anti-competitive levels.
Unless, of course, we don't buy those products. If however, people choose to buy those products, then it looks to me like they value price over quality. At that point, who am I to disagree with their decisions?
I take it you've never experienced real poverty? $300 over 5 years ($60 a year) might seem minuscule to you, and honestly it doesn't seem like much to me either, but to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck and has to constantly choose between, say, buying groceries this week or paying the water bill so that it doesn't get cut off again, saving money can be virtually impossible.
I know it's popular these days to brush off those in poverty and accuse them of either making bad choices, or squandering their money, or being lazy, but some of the poorest people I know are also some of the most disciplined. It takes more discipline than I have to live off of white bread and sliced cheese for three days so that you can pay an electric bill, or to stay home on a Friday night because the $4 that you'd spend on bus fare or gasoline to visit a friend across town is needed for the laundromat, but those are the types of choices that people in poverty have to face every day!
To someone in the middle class, $60 a year on shoes doesn't seem like much. What about clothes? A winter coat? Furniture? Blankets for your bed? And god forbid you want some luxury item like a vacuum cleaner or you have an unexpected medical expense.