What impresses me about Wal-Mart is its growth in the past four decades. It is unbelievable how large the company has gotten in the time it has been open. As of 2004, it had almost 5,000 stores across the world with profits of $9 billion. It is impressive that its strategy of low prices hasn't been duplicated by that many companies. Wal-Mart has also made the transition into the foreign market and has done extremely well. It has over 1,000 different foreign locations in nine different countries as of 2004.
There are not many things that unimpressive about Wal-Mart. Their strategy is one of the best of any industry. Its international expansion is continually growing and it of sells the merchandise of ten stores combined. Wal-Mart has a great relationship with its suppliers and gets their bottom prices. The biggest aspect of Wal-Mart that is very impressive is its customer service. Its employees are very helpful and well informed of the location they work at.
As already stated, Wal-Mart's low everyday prices, wide selection, big percentage of name-brand merchandise, customer friendly store environment and low operating costs have a lot to do with its success of the past 20 years. In addition to that, Wal-Mart also has a strong emphasis on customer satisfaction, disciplined expansion into new geographic markets, and in many cases using acquisitions to enter foreign markets. Wal-Mart didn't use a lot of its revenue on advertising. It relied mainly on word of mouth advertising to spread its marketing message. "Wal-Mart was unusually active in testing and experimenting with new merchandising techniques". Founder Sam Walton imitated good ...