"The nation's No. 1 retailer, closing out a miserable five-year stretch last week, reported an embarrassingly anemic 0.5 percent rise in same-store sales for October and said November may be worse.
Its stock, which used to lead the retail sector, has been flat for the last five years after quadrupling over the previous five.
Desperate to get its sputtering sales engine humming again, Wal-Mart dumped its longtime ad agencies and awarded its $580 million account to a largely unheralded Chicago firm, DraftFCB, headed by rising star Howard Draft.
The move shocked professionals both inside and outside the ad game as Draft made his mark not in the 30-second TV spot world of traditional ad agencies but in the decades-old discipline of direct marketing - long looked down upon and equated with late-night infomercials, junk mail, and bad hair."
The stores are filthy, over-crowded, and staffed by those who would not appear out of character in a remake of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Other, cleaner, fresher, newer, big box stores have, by the droves, taken customers away and Wal-Mart isn't getting them back anytime soon. When given the choice of spending an average $3 per the average $40 spent, many shoppers will gladly shell out the extra cash to frequent establishments that at least make the appearance of seeming somewhat upscale as compared to the slums of Wally World. By simple mathmatics, Wal-Mart remains a giant but a topped-out one.
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