But…but “Tarjey” is French-Canadian! Wal-Mart is from right here in teh Ozarx!
More seriously, I think Wal-Mart hit many places first & built up brand loyalty.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet – one reason Walmart has done so well is the business methodology and infrastructure they’ve developed (e.g., due diligence concerning locations, standardized store layout, pricing models, revolutionary computer system, etc.). My brother (MBA, Duke U.) told me they were used as a positive case study in his business classes.
K-mart, I have no idea. In general, neither my wife nor I shop at any of these stores anyway.
I agree with the OP. Walmart is becoming a glorified dollar store when it comes to quality merchandise. Kmart was lucky Sears bought them up, or vice versa BUT they both SUCK at service! I even had a Kmart cash register scan a coupon and ADD it to my bill! All three are equally callous about consumer relations, too.
Target and Kohls are better, but not as convenient. Not that I need one on every corner, but both are a trek for me. I avoid Walmart, Kmart, and Sears as much as possible.
I’m in the Twin Cities, corporate home to Target. Until recently, that was the WalMart situation here - there was one I knew about in town, not convienent.
Since then they’ve put up a lot more, but the Target is still closer and WalMart that I drive past is one of the dumps (and not all of them are).
The two stores just have a different focus, which is exactly why they coexist. Walmart is a pure value discount retailer and Target is a discount retailer with the upscale higher quality flair that you seem to enjoy. Target calls itself a “discount department store” instead of just a discount store. It’s just their attempt at building brand but I think it defines their space well.
Your assertion that Target has better prices than Walmart is wrong - Walmart has better prices on cheaper products in a slightly worse environment. So it’s just a matter of each company attracting different market segments. I might just as well ask you why anybody wouldn’t just shop at Nordstrom or Barney’s since they carry much nicer brands than Target.
Incidentally, k-mart has had lots of different problems for quite a while but one of them is definitely being unable to position itself effectively between Walmart and Target. Walmart has the discount ultra cheap prices locked up, and KMart can’t effectively position itself as a “slightly higher quality” discount store thanks to Target.
In cases like that, I wonder “where do the white trash folks come from?” I once checked out a Wal-Mart in Highlands Ranch, Colorado – a largely upper-middle class community in largely upper-middle class Douglas County. Same thing: a vast majority of the customers looking like they stepped off the stage of Jerry Springer or out of the photos of the old Mullets Galore site. Where did they come from? The Denver area is quite affluent, and Wal-Mart stores aren’t exactly rare; they’re found even in the lowest-income neighborhoods, which by national standards still aren’t that Springer-ish.
The nearest K-Mart to us is horrible. We’ve shopped there a few times and nearly always regretted it. Pricing is not all that low. Items are not marked or marked with wrong prices. The merchandise is of poor quality. Worst of all are the ludicrous checkout lines. We’ve never been able to get out of the store with less than half an hour’s wait. The last time I couldn’t take it anymore. They had ten people in line and one extremely irate cashier. I left in disgust.
I have no idea how the store survives. In an odd juxtaposition they’re located right next door to a Whole Foods.
There are no Wal-Marts near us but there is a Target so we go there. I like most of the items although I find the Archer Farms brand overpriced and not great quality. Their Choixie brand chocolates are horrible. But I really like the bedding items, furniture and lingerie.
There’s both a WalMart and a Target within 2 minutes of my house. They’re right across the street from each other. We don’t have a K Mart.
I go to Target 99% of the time, but about twice a year I decide to try WalMart for some reason or other (I think maybe something is cheaper, or there’s some item Target doesn’t carry, or whatever). Yesterday was one of those days; I needed blood glucose testing strips, and for whatever reason thought they might be cheaper at WalMart. I also needed a few other things.
So I go to WalMart, gather up my other things (eggs, half & half, a DVD…) then headed to the Prescription area. I can’t find the glucose strips anywhere. They are not a prescription item, and Target has them on the shelves. I finally spot them behind the prescription counter. OK, fine, I gotta ask the pharmacist for 'em.
There’s three windows at the pharmacy. One is marked “Prescription Drop Off”, the middle one is “Consultation” and the far right is “Pay Here.” There’s a woman at the drop off window and another at the “Pay here” window. I step up to the consultation window.
As I do so, a man comes out from the back area of the pharmacy, and asks the woman at the “pay here” counter if she’s picking up a prescription. She says “Yes.” He says “You have to go to the consultation window”
She walks over to where I’m at. I say “You were here first, go ahead of me.” She thanks me and steps in front of me. We’re both about 2 feet from the counter window, waiting for an employee to get there.
The man who told her to change windows looks at us and barks “You need to be behind the black line.”
She and I look at each other, confused. We look at him. He barks again: “Get behind the black line!”
I look behind me - about 4 inches behind me is one of those black ribbony things that they use to keep people in line organized. It’s literally within reach, and both me and the other woman are just slightly in front of it. There is no crowd, indeed, we’re the only two people in line, and we’re not rowdy or anything.
I look at him and say “Why does it matter where we stand?”
He barks “You need to be behind the black line!”
I say “Fine, I’ll go get my stuff at Target, where they don’t care where I stand.”
And I left. On the way out I handed my basket to a cashier and said “You can have this, I’m going to Target to buy my stuff because the guy at the pharmacy desk is so rude.”
She stammers “um um um, do you want to talk to a manager?”
“Nope,” I say “You can tell them he’s incredibly rude, and you’ve lost a sale.”
I went to Target. Stuff I need is in plain sight, on the shelf. I had a question for the pharmacist, who was right there, and helped me regardless of where I stood. She was incredibly polite, sympathetic to my issues, and remembered me when I came back later in the day to pick up a prescription.
Yup, it’s Target all the way for me.
I can walk to Wal-Mart too, and Target is about an eight-minute drive, but I forget Wal-Mart is there, because they rarely advertise. A preprint in the newspaper maybe once every three or four months? Target has an ad in every week. Plus the higher quality, better service, better lighting and cleaner store.
I have a Super Wal-Mart about .5 miles from my home and several Super Targets 2-3 miles from my home.
I’ve tried to shop the Super Wal-Mart but I seriously can’t handle the clientele or the staff there. Like others have mentioned, what rocks do these people climb out from under? Cars parked crooked in parking spots, cars going the wrong direction down parking aisles, trash all over the parking lot from people emptying their cars, etc. And I haven’t even made it through the front door yet.
Then I have to navigate my way around big clumps of people that decided to shop with their entire extended families, clueless folk who position themselves and their carts completely across an aisle, people at the checkouts who are still deciding which items they want and saying the price on the shelf was different, and Targets rejected employees (woman with mustache, girl with purple hair and multiple facial piercings, guy that doesn’t speak english) trying to ring me up.
Not to mention they stock their floors at all hours of the day so there are pallets of crap in the aisles often.
It’s all such a muckity-muck of riff-raff I don’t care to deal with.
Target is always clean, rare do I see a weirdo customer, they have a normal parking lot, their employees are normal, etc. Just a more pleasant experience to navigate.
I have a Wal-Mart Supercenter five minutes away. The nearest Super Target is fifteen minutes away. This Wal-Mart carries a larger selection of the stuff I buy and has a great selection of “diet” foods (sugar-free stuff, for example, and the double fiber bread I buy. I <3 my store’s buyer).
Meijer! Meijer’s Thrifty Acres, right? When I was but a wee lass I used to partipate in their scavenger hunts and would win a goldfish. I still remember my goldfish from them!
Er…sorry.
Anyway. Wal-Mart - I do shop at Wal-Mart occasionally. We have the biggest Wal-Mart in the country here now. :rolleyes: Just what we needed in freakin’ upstate NY. But it’s bad…I mean, everything is there, but the produce aisle is not so good, and yes, the trash that shows up there is unbelievable.
And I have left my groceries there on the conveyor belt, once, the only time I ever did it, due to rudeness and surliness on behalf of the cashier and REFUSAL to get a manager when called on it.
I like Target better myself, but sometimes the mega-Wal-Mart is just easier. And convenience is important, even though people say it should be disregarded.
I think here, at least, the bus stops at Wal Mart but does not stop at Target. I don’t know what bus it is, but it’s either the most northern Akron bus or the most southern Cleveland bus.
There are plenty of bad areas of Denver though. My ex-girlfriend’s brother was shot and killed right in front of his house (admittedly, as part of a deal gone wrong). So there is no lack of Springer-ish population in Denver.
In the DC area, Target is far more convenient to get to. I have at least three Targets that are closer to where I live than the closest Wal-mart.
The main difference between the two of them for me is that the Target tends to have larger aisles than the Wal-mart. I always feel crowded and cramped buying stuff in the Wal-mart as the aisles feel dingy and narrow. In general, the store layout in the Wal-marts I’ve been to seems lacking.
I’ve been to the Wal-mart out in Fairfax, VA and for the most part, the clientele was solidly middle class although the other ones I’ve been to weren’t.
Neither Target nor Wal-mart here are places which carry a large variety of groceries.
I’ve got a Target and Wal-Mart Super Center both about five minutes away. I wouldn’t shop at Wal-Mart anyway because of their evil corporate practices, but also because the place just seems depressing to me. Nobody seems happy to be there – not the customers, and certainly not the dazed-looking teenagers who man the store.
The Target seems fairly pleasant; they have a good DVD section, clothes of reasonable quality, and I’ve come to like the Eddie Bauer brand camping gear.
I really don’t know how K-Mart is staying in business. I’ve been in my local store a few times in the past few years when I was looking for a hardware or camping item. The store seems almost empty, and on two occasions I roamed all over the store, concluded that every single employee was hanging out in a group by the registers, and finally I got onto the PA system to ask somebody to come back to Sporting Goods and help me out. (And I’m not the only one. I was in a K-Mart that seemed abandoned by its employees; children had gotten bikes from Sporting Goods and were riding them up and down the aisles. After I’d been there awhile the quiet was broken by the PA: “This is a customer in the garden section. I’ve been here almost an hour and somebody who works here had goddamn better get back here.”)
Ok, Target has better prices on the things that I buy, than Walmart does, even if they have higher prices in general. I wouldn’t shop at Barney’s or Nordstrom because I can not (nor will I ever be able to) afford to. Whatever price variance does exist between Walmart and Target is not even remotely comparable from the variance between Target and Nordstrom’s/Barney’s. Not a valid comparison.
It’s a valid example of two companies co-existing by targeting a different segment of the market. Nordstrom doesn’t expect to get all of Walmart or Target’s customers anymore than Target expects to get Nordstrom or Walmart’s customers. I agree Target and Walmart have a much more similar focus than Walmart and Nordstrom or Target and Nordstrom. My point wasn’t that they’re similar, it’s that they’re targeting different types of people and there’s no rational reason to expect them to not be capable of co-existing. Those obese poor people who do their shopping in pajamas are exactly the reason Walmart still exists.
Incidentally I think it’s interesting that a big part of the reason K-Mart is in such a poor position is exactly what you were getting at. K-Mart, unlike Walmart, actually isn’t cheaper than Target, but they are no where near as nice, so it’s quite squeezed out.
There are no Wal-Marts around me. But Target is 5 minutes away.
Target has cute clothes sometimes, decent selection of DVDs and stuff, and nice home furnishings. I go there often.
I’ve traveled to go to a Wal-Mart in the area before, usually right before leaving for a year away at college to pick up cheap basic stuff like shampoo etc.
My boyfriend lives in Columbia, MO, where some of the Wal-Mart kids still live. All the Wal-Marts in Columbia have been renovated/completely re-done in the last few years, and at least the one by his house is really nice. I still don’t like going there but it’s the nicest Wal-Mart I’ve ever seen so I put up with it. It’s the closest place for groceries but we’ll travel further to go to a Hy-Vee if we’re getting stuff to make a nicer dinner. Wal-Mart is for beer and barbeque items like turkey burgers and chips. Wal-mart has no clothes I find attractive and while their home furnishings are getting better in looks I still prefer Target. Just wish my Target was a Greatland one, those are awesome.
Greatland or Super?
Regular Target has one set of doors.
Greatland Targets have two sets of doors.
Super Targets have two sets of doors plus a grocery store.