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Wal-Mart Case Analysis

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Wal-Mart – Case Analysis

Situational Analysis Wal-Mart is an American publicly incorporated large retail company founded by Sam Walton in 1962. The secret of Wal-Mart’s tremendous success is its ability to provide an immense number of merchandise from electronics to pharmaceutical goods at a discounted price all in one store. As the largest employer in the world, Wal-Mart enjoys an estimated 20% of the retail grocery business. Recently, after years of disappointing investors, shares of the discount chain have jumped to a four-year high. But are they now too pricey? Compared with the broader stock market, Wal-Mart's stock performance has been tremendous. While the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has tumbled almost 9% so …show more content…

Alternative III: A characteristic that is valuable and difficult to imitate is a loyal and motivated workforce. It requires time to develop a company culture of dedication and commitment to hard work. In 2008 a large lawsuit filed against Wal-Mart that alleges discrimination against women. The lawsuit represented 1.6 million that creates a bad image to the customers that Wal-Mart does not treat its employees fairly and that will tend to keep customers away. Wal-Mart was under scrutiny because even though 66% of its workforce was female only 33% were hired for management positions The threat by its employees to join and form unions even though unions are good for workers they do tend to hurt the bottom line for organizations, the reasons why Wal-Mart’s prices are low is their ability not to offer benefits and their low wages compared to others in the industry. If Wal-Mart corrects this problem they may be able to attain an even greater workforce drowning out the competition.

Recommendations Alternative III focuses on improving the workforce in order to ultimately gain a higher percentage of retail workers in the industry. People would want to work for Wal-Mart if their female to male ratio for management positions were relatively equal. Even though this strategy would improve the workforce it does not solve the problem with a saturated retail market nor

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