Society

Wal-Mart CEO: People Are “Running Out Of Money”

Not that we need signs of our economic crisis, but Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke made a chilling observation this week at an event talking about the company’s operations. Duke said his customers are simply “running out of money.”

The most chilling aspect of this statement is that Wal-Mart is not just the largest retailer but the store with a demographic that is most representative of the country’s economic profile. Wal-Mart averages 140 million shoppers weekly to its stores in just the United States alone.

Duke observed that the store is facing serious pressures because his “core consumers [are] under a lot of pressure.”

Source: CNN

50 thoughts on “Wal-Mart CEO: People Are “Running Out Of Money””

  1. The rich, like the CEO’s of big corporations won’t realize the result of their handiwork until their corporate profits are hurting because the “peasants” can no longer afford the products they are selling. Even then I’m afraid they’ll find other places to lay the blame than shipping the backbone of the American economy (manufacturing) to other countries.

  2. Umm.. In order for businesses to survive, they need a consumer base that can afford their products. Outsource jobs overseas, eliminate collective bargaining rights, deprive people of affordable health-care, privatize education, etc., and the consumer base becomes too impoverished to support the businesses.

    I wonder how Lamborghini dealerships are doing these days, though?

  3. Swarthmore mom 1, April 29, 2011 at 11:37 am

    Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Family Dollar are taking customers from Walmart. Prices are cheaper.

    —————————————————————-
    So what you’re saying is,

    They’re bucking the trend?

  4. The stock market says it all. Tiffany’s stock is up and Family Dollar’s stock is up. Bush’s bifurcated economy lives on.

  6. Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Family Dollar are taking customers from Walmart. Prices are cheaper.

  7. “We’re living the Republican dream and millions of people are suffering from it?”

    I’m not sure your astute comment needed to end with a question mark, rc. A period would have been just fine as that makes a fine and true statement and is not even a rhetorical question let alone in question.

  8. We continually hear the assertion from conservatives that we have to acquiesce in any and every way to the nation’s top earners’ demands and the needs of businesses because they produce markets and jobs. The comments from Walmart underscore why the conservatives’ statement is either an outright lie or just a fanciful though false notion. As Thom Hartmann so often points out, markets, jobs and entire economies happen when CONSUMERS have the money to spend on the things they are willing to buy. No company is going to build a plant or hire people just because they got a tax break. Folks need the jobs that the GOP has aided and abetted going off shore. They need unions to protect those jobs, wages, benefits from the greed of politicians and corporate execs.

    The conservative model has for three decades now been to assume that whatever the producers produce, the consumers will consume whether they actually want it or can afford it or not. Thus, they believe, even if one has to remortgage their home to the hilt, consumers will consume. And to accommodate that, easy credit instead of wage increases became part of our society. So, over the past 30 years real wages have stagnated while debt, both individual and national, has sky rocketed.

    We’re living the Republican dream and millions of people are suffering from it?

  9. Wal-Mart shoppers have historically been people making at or below the average wage in America. People buy cheap goods at Wal-Mart because for the overwhelming majority of them, that’s what they can afford to buy. Wal-Mart did try to expand their customer base with the deli’s and ‘Wal-Mart Designer’ brands but the core of their base is still people that can’t afford to shop as if price weren’t the major concern.

    We seem to have an economy that resembles nothing so much as an ouroboros, a snake consuming itself tail first. The more aggressive firms like Wal-Mart were in seeking the lowest common denominator of price in the manufactur of goods (to the point of becoming outsourcing partners with their suppliers) the more corrosive the effect on the domestic labor market. That sent more customers to Wal-mart and helped Wal-mart expand it’s position with (primarily) business’ outsourcing their production to China.

    It has now reached the point that the general lack of wealth among the typical Wal-Mart shopper will likely continue to degrade to the point that even Wal-Mart will undergo a constriction of profit. Wal-mart is not the only culprit, but is the most easily recognized among them.

    There was a saying I heard years ago “As GM goes,so goes the nation.” That line on the downslope has been crossed. It looks like you can now, sadly, substitute ‘Wal-Mart’ for ‘GM’. When Wal-Mart is worried about people being too poor to keep making them rich it’s the end of the world as we know it.

  10. Maybe they should have wondered who would buy their merchandise before ruining the Main Street economy.

    I haven’t set foot in a Walmart since the LA Times ran a series, years ago, demonstrating that Walmart not only runs their competitors out of business, but even their own suppliers. They’d buy up a farmer’s whole crop, or a factory’s whole output, and then, after the farmer or factory had lost its network of customers, cut the price they’d pay until the supplier couldn’t possibly cover their own costs. Scorched-earth capitalism at its finest.

  11. Gee, Mikey sure does have a keen sense of the obvious. The haves are finally what we have-nots on the ground have known and felt for a few years now.

    Welcome to the real world, Mikey.

  12. look Wally really led the charge to take manufacturing jobs to China. Sure it made their crap a little cheaper but its a dead-end road for them. When people can no longer afford their cheap crap because their part-time, no-benefit, minimum-wage jobs don’t stretch they are screwed. Of course the middle class was screwed earlier, harder and more often by then.

    There is a story of a T-shirt mill in the US begging Wally to tell them what price they needed to meet to sell to them. They were told no price would be good enough.

    This is not just Wally but across the board in the US. The masters of the universe will not be satisfied until they have built a third world hell hole for American workers to live in.

  14. Blouise,

    They can’t even blame the Unions for nothing….I forgot that at the writing….

  15. Blouise, For some reasons, Americans think they are entitled to cheap energy.

  16. SWM,

    They are going back to “Core Values”….such as notions, hunting etc…getting away from the Consumer Delicatessens..realizing that they cannot compete with other retailers….

    I think that they are the pulse of the economic profile of America…not the world yet….

  17. Swarthmore mom
    1, April 29, 2011 at 9:25 am
    High gasoline prices are here to stay as worldwide demand continues to increase.

    =================================

    Yes indeed … everybody better learn how to adjust

  18. High gasoline prices are here to stay as worldwide demand continues to increase.

  19. Sounds like a good excuse for mismanagement … should have stayed away from that high-end merchandise, Mr. Duke. Bad business decisions usually lead to bottom-line problems … unless you’re a bank or an investment house. Too bad you can’t blame Unions or high medical insurance costs … so go ahead … blame gas prices. You neglected to mention that your pay package fell to just a little over $18 million because your stores failed to meet their target last year, before gas prices became an issue, but … hey … whatever floats your boat.

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