Inflation recession ,bankruptcies

Vis-a-vis Walmart/target dropping in sales.

Im not sure thats quite the tolling of the recession bell just yet (it might be the very start, its certainly due at this point) think this way, their sales projections havent dropped since the 80s, but they havent had competition since the 80s either, amazon is the new kid thats been taking their lunch money. I dont know that thats a good thing, probably not, their biz practices are arguably worse than walmart's and likely more dangerous to long term supply chain resilence and certainly to consumer resilience if they ever fail. When we talk about "too big to fail" thats amazon if they manage to put big box retailers out of buisness.

 

I know myself and 3 others who quit shopping Walmart because they only open 2 or 3 tills because they want everyone to do self checkout. Sobeys still serves me like I’m a customer I’ll pay the tiny bit extra .

 

I refuse to self check at any store.

 

Yeah, Those self checkouts the cashiers are total jerks.
Don’t say welcome to store, thanks for shopping, come back again or anything.

It’s just like going to one of their real cashiers.

 

IMO Walmart wants to close the stores and go all online shopping. Way more profit that way and they are steering people towards that little by little.

 

Not their core competence, amazon is forcing them to do it that way about 10-15 years earlier than they want to

 

I think it's a combo of online and self checkout business model. That both are going for. Eventually, from cameras. You'll be able to just load up your cart and have it automatically deducted when you leave the store.

I personally like the self checkout. I'm faster and bag things better than the cashier.

 

Im not saying walmart doesnt want to move in that direction, im saying it wasnt probably what they want to do NOW. You have to herd and train customers to do what you want them to, theyve been playing with self-checkout for a long time and its still not as good as it needs to be, moving all online is another big leap yet.

Amazon customers are self-selecting into that model though and walmart must ramp that up faster than they thought they had to to avoid losing a customer base. But their core competency was being better than kmart at the box store game, scalability and supply chain.

Theyre a tech-saavy older uncle where amazon is native to the online game