Need Walmart Supplier research

I found this one that talks about their relationship with Vlassic:

A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic's gallon jar of pickles.

Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97--a year's supply of pickles for less than $3! "They were using it as a 'statement' item," says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the "mad scientist" of Vlasic's gallon jar. "Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart's about. You can buy a stinkin' gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it's the nation's number-one brand."

Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world's largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. And the fevered buying spree that resulted distorted every aspect of Vlasic's operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.

Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us "every day low prices." It's the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

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And I found several articles ranting about how Walmart forced many of it's vendor to implement a new shipping technology:"

There has always been a love-hate relationship between Wal-Mart and its suppliers. And in a lot of ways, the RFID mandate has exacerbated that relationship," says Andrew Macey, vice president, global supply chain, at Sapient Corp., a Cambridge, Mass.-based consulting and technology services firm. "It's a double-edge sword for suppliers to be supplying to Wal-Mart. . . . The revenues are hugely important to consumer packaged goods companies. Yet they are extracted at a heavy toll. Wal-Mart is relentless on price. Service levels are very difficult to manage to," he says. "The RFID dimension is just an added burden of cost, and Wal-Mart has been very clear that they do not want to pay for it. So, for most suppliers at the moment, there are lot more negatives than positives," contends Macey.

Wal-Mart suppliers have collectively spent $250 million to implement RFID, calculates AMR Research. Yet, "many are more convinced than ever that there is no benefit, and even worse, consider their technology investments to be throwaway so far," AMR Research's Romanow stated last December.


http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=10055

Type "RFID Walmart" nto Google to find more like that one.

Here's a article on their relationship with music labels:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/6558540/thekillers?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single1&rnd=1097616001120&has-player=unknown

Boomerang - Thank you! I had the fastweb article but not the other two. Thanks!

You are most certainly welcome. Post a link to your article when you get it finished.

It was funny - I was researching Walmart on the morning you posted your question so I had a lot of those articles up on my computer already!

Where I live there aren't many Walmarts; I don't even know where one is. They are proposing a site near my home, however. A letter to the editor in my newspaper cited a study showing that Walmart employees in California sucked up over $50 million in taxpayer dollars from public assistance.

I thought I should do a little research and here we are!

Welcome to A2K.

CNBC did a one hour special on Walmart prrchasing strategies about one month ago (that's when I saw it)