I used to sell to Walmart back in the early to mid-’90’s and their sales eclipsed everyone even when they had less stores than Kmart. I remember being in a big vendor meeting in their auditorium and they were pushing to hit $100 billion in sales, which was really an unheard of number for any retailer to be shooting for. Kmart was at this point starting to implode, as was another chain a lot of people on here won’t even know - Ben Franklin stores. Sam Walton originally ran a Ben Franklin store, the precursor to what became Walmart. BF and Kmart were terrible to sell to, filled with unscrupulous buyers and category managers who literally would demand payola in order to get pieces of business.
My first time visiting with the VP of Walmart’s then relatively new photo department occurred in one of their warehouse break rooms. He asked if we wanted a cup of coffee, which I said yes and he replied with great - it’s just $0.10 a cup over there at the machine. There was no taking buyers out for lunch or dinner, or going golfing with them - for Walmart and their employees, it was all about passing every possible savings onto the consumer, knowing it would drive sales.
When I first got product into Target, they pushed for ridiculous terms, and I said to them, more than a little pissed off, that I would offer them the same terms as we give Walmart, and that they would have to arrange shipping to their warehouses, just like we did with Walmart. The buyer was like, “Walmart picks up your product?” And my reply was, 3 days a week we had trucks picking up product for 8 warehouses around the country. These 20-something kids that Target had hired who thought they were big shots, but there weren’t even close to being at the same level as Walmart.
I’m really surprised that Walmart didn’t jump into online sales sooner. They could have leveraged their distribution system immediately, even deliver products from stores to cover the country in a way that took Amazon a decade to get to.
