The Consumer Grudge and Why I Hate Wal-Mart Internet Marketing for Internet Retail : The Preston Blog

The Consumer Grudge and Why I Hate Wal-Mart

Four years ago I needed money
When I was in college, I had a series of jobs that just didn’t work out. I either didn’t feel like I was getting good real-world experience or I wasn’t making enough money. Finally, I came to the point where I decided to just do something different. I contacted a company that sold insurance and thought I would try my hand at that. It was a relationship marketing opportunity where you received leads from the company, then visited people in their homes and attempted to get them to sign a policy.

Making money sounded good and I was excited for a sales opportunity that didn’t require me to generate my own leads. As anyone who has done sales knows generating leads is the hardest part of the sales process for an amateur.

“Meet me at Wal-Mart”
So one of their “experienced salesmen” met me at Wal-Mart and I left my car in their parking lot while we ran to the appointment. When I got to the Wal-Mart I still had about half an hour so I ran in and bought some things that I needed - the total bill was about $20.

Side note: An “experienced salesman” in Utah County is someone who hasn’t realized yet that the stories of riches they heard in the interview are fiction. Typically you can take whatever they tell you they make and drop a digit to figure out their true salary. In this case the salesman claimed to be making over $100K per year, but was driving a 15-year-old Honda because “his wife had the Lexus” - thinking that he was joking I told him that my Bentley was in the shop. Apparently he wasn’t joking.

I came back to a boot on my car
When we got back to Wal-Mart I had a boot on my car. I figured that it was just a mistake, so I called the towing company to let them know they had made a mistake. The guy came and told me it would cost $50 to get the boot removed. I told him I had actually purchased merchandise from Wal-Mart - I admitted that I had left my car there for about 45 minutes, but I was a customer and not somebody just taking advantage of their parking lot. Note that the University Parkway Wal-Mart in Orem has a huge parking lot with plenty of empty spots.

Wal-Mart considered not charging me $50 to shop there
He called a manager from Wal-Mart and had me go in the store to speak with the manager. I showed the manager my receipt and he didn’t think that I would need an hour and a half to buy the stuff I had bought - I admitted that I had left for 45 minutes. He told me that parking was for customers only and when I left the property I was no longer a Wal-Mart customer.

They were right about one thing
I haven’t been a Wal-Mart customer (except when I absolutely had to go there) since that day. I have bought things from time to time when I couldn’t find something anywhere else or it was the only store I was near, but it has always been grudgingly and I always recognize they are the enemy - the only exception are the friendly senior citizen greeters - everybody else works for the devil himself.

The experience started to fade away in my mind and I always tell people that I don’t like to go there because it’s crowded and everything they sell is a poor quality - while this is true, the main reason I don’t shop at Wal-Mart is because they train their employees to handle problems by the numbers - they don’t care about people.

Do business the right way
Sam Walton would have a heart attack if he saw the way his company was being run today - Sam Walton cared about selling quality products at prices that everybody could afford. Executives today are driven by the dream to become the first $1 trillion dollar company - it is business by the numbers, not business for the people.

Differentiate yourself and build a true brand by focusing on the people you serve - this is one thing that I think we do very well at Sewell. Most of our competitors charge a fee for returning or exchanging products and don’t offer technical assistance. We have always offered full refunds for returns and tech support by a knowledgable staff. It is a seemingly small difference, but when our customers need another computer product, we are always the first place they check. That kind of loyalty is priceless.

9:33 pm