THE ROMAN EMPIRE FELL.... SO TOO CAN WALMART

Nobody ever thought that the Roman Empire would fall, but it did. Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer is beginning to show some warning signs. It may not be as invincible as people once thought. In Mississippi for example, several of the Wal-Mart stores that conducted their annual audits in 2012 have had nightmarish results. Stores that typically shrink .50 percent or .60 percent have blown up to over 1.1 percent. This translates to over one million dollars in shrink in a years time.
Some of the decisions put forth by the powers that be in Bentonville, Arkansas have had dismal results mainly at the store levels. The mindset of those in Bentonville, the corporate level Wal-Mart associate is to make the shopping experience for the customer as convenient as possible. This is where the hypocrisy begins.
The folks in Bentonville decided that customers who had to wait for a department manager to arrive on scene with keys to unlock the cologne and perfume cases were being inconvenienced. So their idea was to remove the perfume and cologne's from the cases. Here's the problem with that little idea. What they don't realize is that by unlocking expensive cologne and perfume, they create wonderful opportunities for shoplifters to steal it. Trust me, TONS of perfume and cologne is stolen from Wal-Mart's across the nation. For some reason, they feel as if the trade off is fair.
Refund fraud at Wal-Mart stores is simply off of the scale. Merchandise gets walked right out of the front doors because the company did away with it's express refund program. Again, the company thought it was AN inconvenience to it's customers when they had to wait at the front door for the people greeter to scan the returned items. So what do they do? The typical knee jerk reaction, they do away with express refund. Now it's pretty much open season for the dishonest.
Speaking of people greeters, this is another reason the company is losing its tail. No knock at Wal-Mart's greeters because many of them are sweet old folks, but shoplifters run circles around these poor people. Computer push out's, TV push out's, boosters, you name it. They all take advantage of the usual senior citizen people greeter. Wal-Mart has a terrible first line of defense.
One of the biggest idiotic decisions made by the suits in Bentonville was to basically rape and pillage the store's payroll hours. This was just the most ridiculous idea ever. Why? Well by doing this, the company ties the store manager's hands. The company reduces payroll, which means less people and more work. What does less people more work mean? Simple, it means that the poor associate that is at work that day (basically by themselves) in a department, is running from one end to the other trying to get the work done. Customer's are waiting for service, but don't get that service because there's not enough people in the department to help them. Wait a second. Didn't I say before that Wal-Mart corporate wanted to make the customer's less inconvenienced? Hence, hypcoricity.
Wal-Mart has associates called APM'S (Assset Protection Managers). The idea behind the creation of this position was a good one, but the company did a great job destroying the results. APM's had the store safety program dumped on them, the store compliance dumped on them, internal theft investigation, external theft investigations, and several other responsibilities dumped on them. How they are supposed to impact theft/shrink with all of that on them is beyond comprehension.
Assistant managers are basically overpaid stockers. They have pressure put on them from above to get results with skeleton crews. They end up stocking shelves themselves just to get the work done. The store has scorecards that are applied to departments. The associates must make certain marks on these scorecards. The problem again, payroll hours reduced, meaning less workers, meaning.... To hell with scorecards, and to hell with good moral. Assistant managers get so much pressure put on them to get paperwork done that they end up pencil pushing a lot of it. It's a vicious cycle. Wal-Mart's reputation is rapidly getting worse. Customer's walk in and see 26 front end registers with only 1 or 2 of them opened up for checkout. The cashiers are usually mentally beat up, tired, and cranky. Customer service is terrible. No big surprise.
The company has risen insurance rates, taken away the dollar extra an hour on Sunday's, taken away profit sharing, and capped salaries for hourly workers. The signs are all there. The Roman Empire fell, so too can Wal-Mart.