Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Is the US getting too poor to shop at Wal-Mart?
Despite showing a profit this quarter, there was trouble in the Wal-Mart home market. Sales in US stores were off almost 1%.
Shoppers at the low end of the market are under as much pressure as ever, Wal-Mart executives said Tuesday.Having created its market by destroying Main St and driving US manufacturers overseas, has Wal-Mart gone too far and destroyed its own customer base?
“Our core customer continues to be strained, and we still see what we call the paycheck cycle as pronounced as ever, and of course the volatility in the headlines, the volatility caused last week, doesn’t help the customer,” said Charles M. Holley Jr., Wal-Mart’s chief financial officer, in a call with reporters. “We haven’t seen any relief,” he said, and “we’re starting to see jobs as the number one concern among our customers at Wal-Mart.”
Those worries among customers contributed to the ninth consecutive quarter of declining same-store sales at Wal-Mart’s United States stores. The decline, 0.9 percent, was worse than analysts’ forecasts for a 0.6 percent decline.
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