Wal-Mart Case Study

Wal-Mart Assignment Questions:
  1. What impresses me most about Wal-Mart is their success rate without many downfalls. They have managed to develop a great long-term growth system over the years, while also perfecting the way that they run their company with the lowest prices and how they have dominated over their competition over the years. As I mentioned, I believe that Wal-Mart’s success over the past 25 years is how they have managed to develop long-term growth. Sam Walton’s business strategy was to “Buy cheap and sell it for less then the other guy,” how they have managed to stay in business on an international basis is by also having quality products or at least comparable to their competitors. They are also able to give their customers plenty of options in their stores. Customers can do almost all of their shopping at Wal-Mart giving it a “one-stop shop” reputation. On an internal basis, their main goal for their business is to be efficient and to get their products on the shelves as soon as they can. They focus on reducing transportation and packaging costs to limit the time that it takes to get to the consumer. They listen to what the consumer believes to be important, which is to save money and live better. It is a great strategy that is well executed. It is all three; great strategy, superb implementation and strong leadership that helps Wal-Mart to be what it is today, but I believe that it is mainly a superb strategy implementation and execution that Wal-Mart does so well at. A lot of companies have the same strategy as Wal-Mart, which is having the lowest prices, but the majority of them cannot even touch what Wal-Mart accomplishes. Most companies with that strategy tend to not grow or suffer from very minimal profits. A lot of them also fail because the consumer does not want to feel cheap when they shop there. When consumers do not want to shop there and their profits cannot make up for their expenses they can only shut down. Leadership is really... [continues]

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