Miles and Snow have produced a typology of business level strategies. Their typology involves four strategic types: defenders, prospectors, analyzers and reactors. Using Miles and Snow’s strategy typology that consist of; defender, analyzer, reactor, and prospector, I will categorize Dollar Tree in its strategy typology. In the first strategy defenders try to carve a niche in the market where stability can be found. As in the prospector strategy, companies are constantly producing innovations. I understand through Miles and Snow typology of business level strategies that defenders, analyzers, and prospectors are forms of organizations. Therefore, if an alignment is reached between a chosen strategy, and organizational structure mentioned above Dollar Tree has the potential to be a …show more content…
However, a non-alignment between strategy and structure, will affect Dollar Tree revealing that it is an ineffective competitor in the industry, known as the reactor strategy. In my opinion, I would categorize Dollar Tree as a analyzer. The organization has both characteristics of defender and prospector. Retail environments are more competitive today. And Dollar Tree top competitors are Wal-Mart and Target. Sam Walton opened the first Wal-Mart in 1962. Walton wanted to market American made products at a price lower enough to meet foreign competition. Wal-Mart is the largest discount retailer in the world, which typically provides a grocery store and automotive repair shop for its customers. The major reason behind the success of Wal-Mart lies in the fact that the company believes and concentrates on the strategy of single business, which means more than 95% of
Wal-Mart Corporation is one of the largest retail stores in the world. They serve customers in meeting their needs with low cost saving items. On October 31, 1962, Wal-Mart was founded and incorporated by Sam Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas. Mr. Walton went into business because he felt that items sold were too high for the average customer to afford. His focus was to sell products at low prices to get higher volume sales at a lower profit margin. He bought bulk products from different suppliers so he could incorporate savings into his pricing to lower cost for customers. Under the savings cost concept, Wal-Mart grew rapidly and surpassed its competitors in sales and generating profits.
The Dollar Tree brand of stores has been around since 1986, when Douglas Perry, Macon Brock, and Ray Compton founded the chain as a compliment to their other business, K & K Toys (Parnell, 2014). Through the years, Dollar Tree has acquired several different dollar store and low-end retail chains to grow their business to over 4000 stores (Shetty, 2010). One of the first and most strategic moves that the company made was to shift away from carrying closeout merchandise and to become more of a traditional variety store with a wide variety of basic goods all priced at a dollar or less. To accomplish this change, the chain had to discontinue their current purchasing strategies and had to begin buying directly from manufacturers to change the type of merchandise that they had available for consumers. The second major strategic move involved changing the location of where stores are usually located. Up until this point, the stores had been being in enclosed malls. With this change,
The Miles and Snow typology helps determine the overall strategy of an organization with prospectors on one end of the spectrum and defenders on the other (Parnell, 2014). Attempting to determine where a specified company can be reasonably challenging but understanding the market’s maturity can help identify model approaches. Dollar Tree operates in a fairly maturity market that sells universal commodities, therefore operating under a prospective mentality would be tremendously problematic due the consumers’ attention to cost. Therefore, Dollar Tree would be placed closer to the defender side of the spectrum. The defenders assume that the market is stable and the majority of the strategic emphasis is on internal process improvements which appears to be Dollar Tree’s ploy in the past as they have been attentive to increasing their supply chain efficiency and decreasing overall product cost to ensure the longevity of their $1-dollar structure. However, the recent acquisition muddles the perceived concentration as their overall strategy has
Walmart was founded on the belief stated above by its founder Sam Walton in 1962. “Saving people money, so they can live better,” was the main objective when Sam Walton opened the doors to the first Walmart (“History”). Today, Walmart is the world’s largest retailer and corporation in the United States and have been awarded and recognized by various organizations for being the best employer throughout United States and other countries. By the Fortune magazine, it is listed as one of the most admired
Dollar Tree is an American chain of discounted items in many varieties that sells for$1 or less. They are the largest single priced retailer. Dollar Tree carries items that are used as consumable, variety categories and seasonal. You can shop at any Dollar Tree and find items such as health and beauty care, household consumables, home decor, office and school supplies, party supplies, toys, floral supplies, kitchenware and cutlery, and seasonal merchandise, paper products and chemicals products, candy, food and frozen and refrigerated foods, and soft lines. Dollar Tree has everything you need for every day, every holiday, and every occasion. Dollar Tree is so large that they have a total of 4,992 stores in the 48 States and has 10 distribution centers across the US. There is probably a Dollar Tree right down the road from where you stay. Dollar Tree is very considerate of their customers. They want to make sure that when the customers come into the store to shop that they are having fun while doing so. They understand about placing their customers’ and shareholders needs and want first to better position themselves in the future and to keep ahead of their competitors. Dollar Tree has a strong market position because it is the largest single priced retailer that makes as strong as they are, and with the integration of the Family Dollars stores, Dollar Tree future is looking mighty bright. Dollar Tree wants to continue to improve in their sales year after year. After the
Walmart is the largest discount retailer in the world. The company started out as a small chain of stores in rural towns. Walmart was founded by Samuel Walton in 1962. In the United States they employed the most workers. Walmart supply grocery store and automotive repair shop for customers. With this being one of the largest chain stores valUes and attitudes is very important in the workplace.
Wal-Mart is a general merchandise discount retailer, which was incorporated in 1962. Wal-Mart’s history is based on one man, Sam Walton, who changed the course of retailing forever. Sam Walton first entered retailing when he was a management trainee at J.C. Penny Co. in 1940 in Des Moines, Iowa. After serving in the Army in World War II, Walton acquired a Ben Franklin variety store franchise with his brother James Walton in Newport Arkansas, until they lost the lease to the store in 1950. By 1962, when the first Wal-Mart Discount City was opened in Rogers Arkansas, both Walton’s were operating fifteen stores under the “Walton 5 & 10” name, and were the largest Ben Franklin franchisee in the
The Miles and Snow typology is meant to help organizations learn the effects of business-strategy (Hambrick, 1983). In doing this, the researchers
Wal-Mart was first opened in 1962 by Sam Walter as a retail store. It started out a five and dime store in Rogers, Arkansas and was called Walton’s. He opened this store with one goal in mind, to sale at the lowest prices possible, quality leadership and great customer services. He thought that his idea could change the retail industrial. Wal-Mart was built on a solid foundation that remains stable even after the death of Mr. Walton. Wal-Mart became the largest multinational retail store in America, with a grocery store and a pharmacy. There is a Wal-Mart in all fifty states and seventeen international states and has more than 2.3 million employees. This store
Wal-Mart, the big giant, the place where a lot of people usually do their shopping for the low prices and the variety of products were founded by Sam Walton. Walton was an entrepreneur with an innovative vision started his own company and made it into the leader in discount retailing that it is today. In fact, Wal-Mart is considered to be the biggest company in the U.S. and it has stores worldwide. According to PBS, “Wal-Mart employs more people than any other company in the United States outside of the Federal government, yet the majority of its employees with children live below the poverty line.”(www.pbs.org) In addition, Wal-Mart likes to portray itself as a seller of U.S. manufactured goods
Walmart is a multinational corporation with 11,000 retail locations located in 27 countries and is the largest retailer in the world. With over 2.2 million employees, Walmart is the also largest employer in United States the world. The history of Walmart dates back to 1962 when founder Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas. By the late 1960s, total sales were over $12 million with 24 Walmart stores spread across Arkansas (Riffel, 2014). “By the end of the 1970s, Wal-Mart had expanded into a number of different services in its stores—selling pharmaceuticals, adding auto service centers, and introducing jewelry divisions.
Wal-mart is the number one retail store in the U.S. and was founded by Sam Walton in 1962. Wal-mart has expanded to include the U.S., Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, China, and various other places. In 1988, Wal-mart developed the Supercenter concept to meet the growing demand for one stop family shopping. Supercenters combine grocery and general merchandise all under one roof. Their purpose is saving people money to help them live better (Wal-Mart, n.d). Even their success Wal-mart has still had many lawsuits for violating labor laws and
The typology for Miles and Snow has four strategic types that include: defenders, prospectors, analyzers, and reactors that are for business level strategies. Miles and Snow created different strategy types that went back in forth that prospectors and defenders are affiliated with processes, structures, and the environment in ways that take them to out do the reactors, which have no steady strategy or alignment (Walker, 2013.) The defenders help to create and shape place that is for Dollar Tree in the market this will help with gaining stability. The prospectors strategy will be to assist in the instability that is evidently seen in Dollar Tree due to make advances and fixes continuously. When looking at the analysis of Miles and Snow’s strategy
Walmart’s first store was opened up in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962 by Sam Walton. Walton had owned a retail store in the previous store and decided to utilize a unique concept to achieve high sales and rise above his competitors in the town and industry. Walton reduced the prices of his products so that they were lower to those that were being offered by the competitors. By 2007, Walmart had over 3,400 retail outlets throughout the country. The store also had 1.3 million employees and had facilitated about 6.49 % of the country’s sales in retail. Walmart deals in the sale of apparel, music, groceries and some household products. In 2005, Walmart’s end of year profits had exceeded those of other retail stores combined such as Target, Costco, Home Depo, and Sears Holding Company.
A number of competitive strategies have been stated by studies, such as the classification system created by Chrisman et al (1988). However, the generic strategies identified by Porter (1985) remain the most popular theory over the years (Allen et al, 2007).