2012 marks Walmart's 50th year anniversary. Walmart: Key Insights and Practical Lessons from the World's Largest Retailer highlights how Walmart came to be a global retailing phenomenon and investigates what it got right, what it got wrong and whether or not it can reconfigure to stay ahead.
Authors Natalie Berg, Global Research Director at Planet Retail, and Bryan Roberts, Director of Retail Insights at Kantar Retail, offer an objective analysis of Walmart's history exploring the company's ups and downs. Although a source for best practice in a number of retail disciplines such as procurement, logistics, systems and store format innovation, the retail giant is now facing several issues that affect where it is headed in the future.
With exclusive interviews with Walmart executives and CEO of Walmart US, Bill Simon, Berg and Roberts address these issues focusing specifically on the following topics:
- The rapid change of retail: What the rise of e-commerce and multi-channel retailing means for Walmart and other retailers and how the impact of Amazon affects every retailer's digital presence.
- Walmart International: Walmart now trades through more stores internationally than in the US, a clear indication of where future growth opportunities lie. Can Walmart's pricing philosophy "everyday low prices" be implemented across all markets? The authors explore where it works, where it doesn't and where it has yet to venture.
- The superstore format: Berg and Roberts predict that Walmart will reach saturation with its core Supercenter format by 2020. With more shoppers moving away from the superstore format, should Walmart move towards small box stores? Will they be able to achieve the same level of success with small stores in big cities?
In a time of rapid change, will the world's largest retailer be able to reconfigure? Walmart provides the necessary insights to understand how it became a retail giant, the lessons that can be learned, and what is in store for the future.
