Walmart's Holiday Promise

Laura Heller

Contributor

Walmart may be many things — controversial employer, international aggressor, home to some very bad dressers if a certain website is to be believed — but what it really is, is the world’s largest retailer. What Walmart does during the holiday season effects shoppers, the economy and the business landscape.

And in 2014, Walmart has pledged not to be under priced in-store or online. There are days and days of deals, online price-matching and an in-store promise to open every cash register.

Walmart considers every retailer its competition. Target of course, is the closest and shoppers should expect the two to compete quite heavily on pricing this season. Kohl’s, Best Buy and to some extent Macy’s are also in this mix. Shoppers looking for the best deals can play all of these retailers off each other by using price matching policies to their advantage.

Amazon, too, will drive price fluctuation. As fellow Forbes contributor Walter Loeb points out, Amazon can change the prices of up to 80 million products in a single day. Because Amazon is less a retailer than it is a technology company (and I defy anyone who thinks otherwise to to try using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk), it has pricing tools and software systems in place that dwarf those of most retailers.

Those of us who follow retail are prone to extolling the virtues of the store experience and how it offers a truer point of differentiation than just low prices. It seems that Walmart is listening on that front too, if recent interest in this story is any indication.

Walmart has pledged to open every register in all stores that sell general merchandise during peak shopping hours. The “checkout promise” is intended to help speed what most shoppers say is the most frustrating part of the in-store experience and alleviate abandoned shopping carts, i.e. lost revenue.

Walmart doesn’t specify what peak hours are, or if it will effect the number of associates available on the sales floor during those times, but it is a nod to the importance of the in-store experience. The retailer has suffered in recent years from understaffed, messy or under-stocked stores. New management has pledged to resolved these issues too.

For all the growth in online shopping, stores still rule retail with close to 94% of all purchases still made in physical locations. Systems and management can only go so far, for Walmart to truly improve the shopping experience it will come down to the people in its stores, ringing all those open registers.

Follow me on Twitter @lfheller, get my newsletter at FierceRetail