"George Leppla" > wrote in message
...
> On 2/8/2015 9:27 AM, William wrote:
>> just curious Jill, what arguement did your group use to successfully
>> block Wally's move on to the island? A small town council near my
>> house refused to allow Wally World in a few years ago and what did
>> Wally do? Instead of one SuperCenter they built three surrounding the
>> town! The world's largest capitalist pig marches forward...the 800
>> pound gorilla of retailing. Can you believe K-Mart did'nt even notice
>> those country bumpkins back in the eighties.
>>
>> William
>
> I worked in management at Kmart back in the late 70's and early 80's and
> they were very aware of Walmart. They even had a committee to study
> Walmart and a lot of their recommendations about display and merchandising
> and distribution were implemented.
>
> Kmart would have been successful competing with Walmart except that the
> upper management changed from marketing people to people with accounting
> backgrounds. When the bean-counters took over, things started going
> downhill fast. Walmart was always run by people whose background was in
> marketing... and the bean counters were no match.
>
> You build a business from the front door in (from the customer's point of
> view), not from the back office out (the accounting management point of
> view).
>
> George L

I worked for K Mart during those years too and then some. We did not have
Walmart in this area then. In fact we didn't get it until I moved away.
But one of my coworkers had worked for Walmart prior so people were always
asking her about the differences. We also made it a point to find Walmarts
when we were on vacation so we could report things back.

This is just my opinion but I think K Mart's biggest mistake was to try to
be more upscale. We were told that they wanted to be more like the Bon
Marche. That really backfired on them. People wanted the cheap, Dollar
Days stuff like Landers cosmetics and poor quality tools. Not all were poor
quality. I still have a $1 hammer.