Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways.

I agree to some extent. There is a term Walmart scale, and it is defined as things that have a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of happening happen 10 times a day at Walmart.

Walmart is targeted, for example, there might be 2x as many Walgreens or CVS locations, but while their revenues are $100-$150B Walmart is closer to $500B and they have 100,000,000 customers enter their stores every week and that is attractive to criminals. Also, I want to note, Walmart shoppers are a much larger cross section than just the poorest of society, in fact you can easily find stores where the average income of their shopper is $80k/year.

Walmart is a target for all kinds of crimes, from their parking lot to shop lifting to cons. I was recently in Bentonville pitching one of my side projects at their HQ, and this topic came up, one ongoing scheme currently taking place consists of a group going into stores with fake documentation from HQ (complete with fake Bentonville phone numbers and fake voicemail) and they literally set up a photo portrait store inside the Walmart in-store leasing locations. Walmart customers are going in and getting portraits done and the group just closes up shop and disappears (the irony, not a single Walmart customer has complained about their experience).

> you can easily find stores where the average income of their shopper is $80k/year.

[Citation needed]

I find Walmarts do best in areas with minimal competition. Arlington VA is an expensive area and only the 'poor' go to Walmart which looks grungy and sit's further south. However, if you go to southern VA you can find some Walmart superstores that don't have a lot of completion stock better goods and flat out look cleaner.

Can't speak to the statistic claimed, which does sound a little out there, but I can certainly testify that multiple millionaires shop at this Wal-Mart: http://www.walmart.com/store/59

Store 59 is also sort of a special case, in that when they leased their first building for it in the '70s, it was at least twice the size of anything they'd leased before, and became the proving ground for their Supercenters. And they made a point of rebuilding and reopening the second building on the site within 6 months after it got destroyed by the 2011 tornado (granted, that was easier since they didn't lose much of their employee pool (no one was killed in that Wal-Mart, but I'm sure some moved away because of the housing shortage), they were all very busy at the 2 other Wal-Marts in the area in the interim).

To provide a personal anecdote, one of those multimillionaires was my father, who in the early '60s was a low level manager at a Ben Franklin "Five and Dime" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_(company) ) in Joplin when Sam Walton, who owned a set of them down in Arkansas, would regularly drive up to Joplin for airplane trips. He'd always stop by and talk to the owner and managers of this (set of?) Joplin (area?) Ben Franklins, getting a feel for what was going on here. Very smart guy (certainly smarter than the Joplin owner, who declined the offer to invest in Walton's new venture...).

Stepping back to the general question, the crime patterns in Joplin area's four Wal-Marts pretty much match the neighborhoods they're in. Before anyone can claim Wal-Mart is doing a bad job here, they've got to correct for that.

Although I can't speak to the stories people are telling of poorly managed ones, only that I've never seen or heard of such here, the stores are well run and to my observation, pretty much all the employees but some of the cashiers are reasonably happy/satisfied with their jobs/whatever.

It is mind blowing how many Walmarts there are in Bentonville, it honestly just doesn't make sense, but they are a good reflection of well kept WM stores.

Coincidentally I went to the Joplin store too while visiting Bentonville. Coming from Miami I have to admit I had zero interest in Bentonville aside from the business opportunity, but I was actually in awe of Bentonville, in particular the downtown area and Crystal Bridges Museum were exceptionally charming, and I was surprised to find locals actually had a tremendous amount of gratitude for WM and the Walton family (in my experience such wealth and influence can generate resentment). For what it is worth, I even decided I would return just to run the Bentonville half marathon.

My dad was targeted in a fake parking lot accident con at the Walmart in Joplin on west 7th.

As you say, the crime patterns pretty much match the neighborhoods the stores are in and that ain't in a good one.

Anecdotally, when our ~40K population town got a Walmart, the police department needed to add a full-time officer position to handle the increase in crime.

(per city council member, many disclaimers apply)

Was that because it was attracting a lot more people/visits from out of town? Also, not that it matters for your city's residents, but did anyone check for displacement effects, is the same amount of crime (with the usual adjustments) happening in the region serviced by it?

It's likely many of those people will also be spending additional money elsewhere in town on their additional visits (at least, that happens in Joplin a lot, although the #1 component of that is almost certainly our 2 hospital/healthcare centers), so did anyone try to figure out if the city financially benefited at net?

Not that that matters all that much if additional crime outside the Wal-Mart is hurting its residents. Or if that politician was lying, as far too many city council members seem wont to do :-(.

How much additional tax revenue did they get?

>[Citation needed]

As I stated I am working with them, so I have some non-public information regarding specific store numbers which I can't disclose under NDA, sorry.

However, here is some public data, the average WM shopper is a 50 year old white women with a household income of $53,125. [1] Another article showing 10% of WM shoppers make $75k-$99k and 15% of WM shoppers making $100K+, though this is based on a survey of 4,000 shoppers, so I don't know how accurate this data really is. [2] You can find other odd facts about their demographics floating around, such as a greater percentage of $100k-$150k households shop at WM than percentage of <$15k households. [3]

100,000,000 customers/week is obviously a ridiculous amount of people and reflects a giant cross section of society. Annually 80% of American shoppers will shop at WM at least once this year, see [3].

Anecdotally, I would say the newer model Walmart Neighborhood Markets are nice and clean, and I would say on par with groceries such as Publix, Meijer and Kroger.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-average-wal-mart-sho... [2] http://www.businesspundit.com/heres-a-breakdown-of-walmart-s... [3] http://brandongaille.com/41-interesting-walmart-shopper-demo...

Ahh ok, household income is different. Fairfax VA has an average household income of 110k and has a Walmart. So, that's reasonable even if they are down market. Anyway, I would be real careful of using survey's for this stuff, people lie.

PS: Average income of their shopper != average household income.

I live in Hampton, VA. I make a bit over $80k/yr and I shop Walmart for groceries, in spite of having a nicer Target a mile close to home on the same road.

I agree on location of Walmarts making the difference. There's at least one in Virginia Beach that feels more like a Target store, better lighting, with much nicer things and less cramped aisles. A couple of the closest ones to me in Hampton are crowded and dingy, generally much less pleasant to shop at.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com