Wal-Mart announced that they would be closing 269 stores this year;154 of the stores are in the United States. In the same announcement, the company said it is planning to open 300 more stores globally next year. So reporter Chris Arnold described Wal-Mart's move as more of a "repositioning" rather than scaling back. The move to close the stores will eliminate about 16,000 jobs — 10,000 of them in the U.S. Of the 154 U.S. Wal-Mart locations being closed, 102 of them are Wal-Mart Express stores, the company's smallest-format stores that had been in the pilot stage since 2011. These stores are mostly found in the South as shown on this
map. Wal-Mart says that they will be focusing more on "strengthening Supercenters, optimizing Neighborhood Markets, growing the e-commerce business and expanding Pickup services for customers."
Wal-Mart just like businesses during the Gilded age practices vertical integration. The company used to only be a retailer - a place where customers shop for consumer goods. But in 1991, the company expanded into offering consumer goods under its own private label brand, Sam's Choice. Walmart is also the owner of Vudu, an online-streaming service. In my opinion, Wal-mart is starting to become a monopoly, the company is tied to so many different industries and has so many different names that it is hard to see that they control a large part of the market place.
Wal-Mart has been a monopoly for quite some time now. I truthfully find this change useless if not terrible, why take away some stores and get rid of jobs just to put more stores up elsewhere? I personally disagree with how Wal-Mart does business, without concern for their workers and pushing out small/local businesses. It really does remind me of the factory jobs during and before the Guilded Age, horrible pay, not the best working conditions, and seeing their workers as interchangeable parts in their monopoly. I hope Target and Costco are able to give Wal-Mart a run for their money. Long live Target!
ReplyDeleteShelby Linker, 8th period