The Homa Files

Excerpted from WSJ, ” Wal-Mart’s Trickle-Down Economics”, March 5, 2009 

The economic crisis is compelling shoppers to dig ever deeper for bargains.

Wal-Mart Stores and Target both stand to benefit from trade-down purchases, but even price-matching can’t trump Wal-Mart’s reputation for value.

Target has been matching Wal-Mart’s prices on identical items in local markets for over 10 years. That’s 20,000 to 30,000 of the roughly 80,000 products in a store.

But Wal-Mart’s image as a bastion of value may be helping it steal traffic, causing customers to purchase items that they could otherwise buy at Target for the same cost.

Target also carries more expensive variations on items such as apparel that consumers are passing over. And more than half of Wal-Mart’s products are regular purchases such as food and personal-care products, while that is about a third of Target’s mix.

Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123628850444943445.html

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This entry was posted on March 16, 2009 at 7:30 am and is filed under Mktg - Shopping Behavior, Mktg - Trading Down, Retailing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.