but, more along the lines of "you can't sell what ain't there."

Dirty Stores, Empty shelves and consistently empty shelves & displays tell the customer that their needs are not important to the store and therefore they need to go somewhere else to buy the item(s) for which they are looking.

Pretty Much your in-stock & in business our you are out of stock and no matter what else you have in that store, on those item(s) you are out of business.

I visited one with my Sister in Louisiana last year and found the conditions I mentioned. The shelves were gutted in several sections and the floor was dirty along with the lighting be poor.

I visited a nearby store about 18 months ago when they added their grocery section (to use the free $5.00 coupon they mailed). The new grocery section had large areas of shelving that were empty and the store looked pretty bad to me.

At a city council meeting this past Autumn in which a new Wal Mart store was being discussed, an individual spoke who served them as a vendor. He commented that while Wal Mart"s store will be new, within a few months it will be unkempt and dirty due to chronic understaffing.

I make my observations based upon 40+ years of retail experience in two different industries, I do know what a clean, fully stocked, well lit, well merchandised store looks like and it has nothing to do with the ethnic background of the customer, but rather the store management and corporate culture.

As to your co-worker's comment about the shopping mall, well, perhaps when they saw it, it was indeed dirty and there was no other inference beyond what they saw at the time they were there.

As to what you think about me and my observations, well that is up to you.

Yes.

WalMart does not want the customer to become accustomed to having a short line, since you are getting a price break.

They will close down idle lines to keep the queue depth at 3 or more.

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In contrast, Target will open up another line when the queue depth is greater than one, if they can.

target has 30 checkstands with one open

Perhaps in your neck of the woods it's different, but in NJ Target opens a line when 2 or more people are in it.

Always the same

You can drive in a 10 mile radius and hit at least 2 WalMarts, 2 Targets, a boat load of CVS and WalGreens, multiple super markets, one or more malls and a bunch of discount stores.

or lack of employees to stock shelves problem.

I have been reading about this for a bit, ever since a Wal Mart Exec. said this was the worst quarter for Wal Mart ever.

Walmart is using a new solution that combines business intelligence, technology and store coverage to address on-shelf availability for the retailer and its manufacturer partners.

Called OSA Now, and developed by Plano, Texas-based Crossmark, the solution uses sophisticated algorithms -- customized for each supplier -- to identify store/item combinations that have a high likelihood of having an OSA problem. Typical issues include out-of-stocks, incorrect on-hand inventory, or products that are not on the planogram.

“OSA Now leverages services unique to Crossmark,” said Ken Drish, VP of business development for Crossmark. “The first is the collaboration between Crossmark’s business insights group and third-party data companies to create custom algorithms for each client, in each category and segment. The second is our retail model which has reps in all stores an average of more than twice per week, allowing reaction to the data faster than anyone else in our space. The third is our ability to measure the impact and show our clients their return on investment.”

With daily alerts, Crossmark retail representatives are able to quickly check whether products are on the shelves, whether a shelf tag is in place, or if there is another problem that is preventing sales of the product.

http://www.progressivegrocer.com/top-stories/headlines/technology/id37678/walmart-deploys-solution-to-optimize-on-shelf-availability/?cid=homepage

WalMart employs a typical 'grocery' store behavior - they move stuff around all the time. Change whole departments, and shelves within departments. It's supposed to make you travel the store more, picking up stuff you don't need.

The problem is that the Super WMs are too big to do that. One day, recently, I went in to pick up some household goods and ended up traveling from one side of the store to the other 3 times looking for what I wanted. Since I am sick, those trips were just too much for me. By the 3rd time I was told the product I needed was on the other side of the store, I just walked out.

I don't go to WM to get my daily 'exercise' through shopping; I only go there out of bare necessity to avoid 3 stops when I'm ill. Since traveling a WM store is equivalent to my getting in and out of the car at 3 PLEASANT stores, I have no reason to go to that gawd awful storage building with no amenities to spend money after waiting in line to check out after my 'workout.'