The Silent Villainy of Wal-Mart
In the movies Office Space and Superman 3, computer geeks siphon off millions of dollars by shifting fractions of pennies unused during payroll into their paycheck. It’s an unrealistic idea to think that the company would not notice large sums of money moving somewhere it didn’t before.
Our strategy when we shop for groceries at Wal-Mart is to stick to name brands that can be had for much less than the other chains and stay away from Wal-Mart house brands under the assumption that Wal-Mart makes less money that way. We like the prices but the service isn’t that great and the produce is generally sub-par. We make our trips monthly and usually fill a cart with 50 or so items.
After going through checkout my wife has a habit of checking the receipts to make sure we didn’t get overcharged. She’s taken up this habit because she’s been finding a lot of overcharges. It’s usually 2 or 3 products and always less than a dime but they are always there. She is determined not to be overcharged and will head right for customer service line and wait to get our 25 or 50 cents back.
I think it’s too much trouble for 50 cents and I’m sure I’m not alone. How many people never notice? How many people get to the car and say “It’s just a quarter, forget it.”?
Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the land. Stealing pennies from every transaction scales very well when it’s thousands of transactions a day at thousands of stores. If you figure only one thousand transactions a day times three thousand stores for 25 cents each that is $750,000 a day. Multiply by 365 days and you get $273,750,000!
Two hundred seventy three million dollars! Earned by stealing pennies from nearly every transaction.
Now, those amounts are pure speculation, but, you can see how this all scales. Wal-Mart is well know for having one of the most efficient supply chains in the world. It makes me think pricing is not handled at the store level. It’s centralized then pushed out to stores. My wife has reported price discrepancies on the same items multiple times and it is not corrected. That shows a failure somewhere along the line or it shows intent.
Have you checked your receipts lately?