Shop Talk
WalMart & Snapper lawnmowers
Yes I'll relate this to cell phones, just bear with me.
I read on AOL Finance News yesterday that the CEO of Snapper lawnmowers had opted out of his agreement with WalMart. Snapper has for years provided lawnmowers at a premium price, with the consumer understanding that the product was top of the line. WalMart was pushing Snapper to continually lower the prices, which would have required Snapper to find an alternate, cheaper, lower-quality manufacturer for WalMart's mowers. The CEO decided this was an unhealthy thing to do for his company, and pulled the plug on the whole deal with WM. He basically said Snapper will not allow its products reputation of top of the line quality to be degraded by being manufactured at a cheaper price, a...
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I read on AOL Finance News yesterday that the CEO of Snapper lawnmowers had opted out of his agreement with WalMart. Snapper has for years provided lawnmowers at a premium price, with the consumer understanding that the product was top of the line. WalMart was pushing Snapper to continually lower the prices, which would have required Snapper to find an alternate, cheaper, lower-quality manufacturer for WalMart's mowers. The CEO decided this was an unhealthy thing to do for his company, and pulled the plug on the whole deal with WM. He basically said Snapper will not allow its products reputation of top of the line quality to be degraded by being manufactured at a cheaper price, a...
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Dont know about that, there was no mention of MTD in the article. To be honest, I've never shopped for a lawnmower at WM, or anywhere else for that matter. The article was based on pricing points, and the mowers provided by Snapper were priced roughly double the least expensive mowers at WM provided by other companies.
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See, that's funny. Some of the better brands would have spin-off companies make cheap stuff for WM... WM would still sell the expensive 'brand-name' item but the lower price point model would be made from the same manufacturer (but with different name & possibly sub-standard parts).
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Yeah that's what I was trying to get at.. the sub-standard stuff out there. Do Motorola/Nokia/SonyEricsson et al provide sub-standard phones for wireless carriers to resell at WM? I mean, I understand how WM works, with profit margins and all that, but seriously, they are really undercutting the agent and corporate stores as far as phone pricing is concerned. And their sales associates product knowledge can only be described as appalling.
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Cellphones are already an outsourced product. Moto's (an American company) are built in Brazil, Nokia (Finnish) are made just about everywhere, Sanyo (Japan) are made in Malaysia...
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With our service they generally end up offering the phones that are ones we no longer sell so I suppose with us it's not that they have cheaper lower quality parts/phones just that they have the out of date stuff. I also have noticed that most of our local wally-words offer mostly the cheapest services... they carry Tracfone and things like that, our pre-paid that they carry are the pre-packaged same things we sell though but again, they're still running the CF62t (the most worthless phone I've ever encountered) on the pre-paid side and the E315 (my phone, the one we stopped selling almost a year ago.) on the contract side. I've seen Fred Myers do the same thing, they still offer the Moto V66 (dear god.)
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Yeah, generally our walmart store here carries phones that have been discontinued for a while. I think they're still selling the Samsung A660 for Sprint (biggest pile of a phone ever) but I don't shop there much so they may have different phones now.
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That's the way I've read it as well. The WalMart company puts such pressure on the businesses t lower the prices that they ends up going out of business or shipping out overeas to China (as Levis had to),that they can't sell the "Made in America" tag line any more. Remember when They had that on everything in Wally world? They can't say that now. Same thing happend to many manufactures. I say Bravo for Snapper for refusing to give in!
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However, on the other side of the propaganda coin: maybe this is Snapper's way of trying to start a ruckus. Okay, they found out when looking at the bottom line that they could never offer anything lower than what they're already providing. They also realize they've lost the WM account to overseas manufacturers of mowers. Snapper has plenty of other resellers selling their line as a quality product. IMO, this is Snapper's way of bringing things to light they couldn't in the past. Free exposure to their product-line(s) and all that.
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I'd agree on the exposure, but WM actually offered them an increase in what they were carrying, bigger sales deal or whatever, I'm a little sketchy on the details now, but basically the CEO turned down a better deal than what he had previously. But the exposure part certainly fits in with some negative publicity WM has gotten lately.
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I also think a lot of people are generally clueless about how horrible Walmart behaves, don't realize that WM pushes it's providers so hard that they have to sell a poorer quality product. I still shop there often, it's bottom line that matters most of the time for me too, I made 20k (barely) last year and the government let me keep 16k of it. I pay 12k a year in rent and that leaves Four Thousand dollars to pay for everything else every year and I'm trying desperately to save for college, when I barely have money for food and lights (my total bills for utilities and everything else add up to 3960... that's electric, car payment, my Karate class, phone bill and internet provider) so every single cent counts. It hate it and more than anyth...
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Although in Europe, you'll be paying a lot more in taxes, but yeah, makes sense that you'd pay more in taxes for having kids then not. Niki, you should move away from Idaho, I'm guessin that the pay levels there aren't going to improve anytime soon. There's always Minnesota 😛
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yep as soon as consumers stand up and say enough to monsters like wm then we will all be better off. When a superstore lands in a community the result for the entire community is that usually many established businesses are forced out of business and the employees have to work at wm just to get a J O B, which can be an acronym for "Just Over Broke". One easy way is to insist on using a person to check you out instead of the express self service where you scan and bag yourself. Make em pay people to do the work and not ask you to do so, hmm if we do wm's work at the check out shouldn't we get a price reduction on the items we buy to compensate us?
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I seem to always buy the same things when I go grocery shopping, my girlfriend has convinced me that Wal-Mart is SO much cheaper, so I had a little experiment, I went to Harris Teeter and bought my usual items, the next time I went to Wal-Mart and was sure to buy the exact same items, I purchased a total of 31 identical items and my total savings were $3.72 an average of .12 per item. Sure $3.72 can buy a pack of smokes or a starbucks drink but I would easily pay $5 not to have to park a mile away, deal with every mullet sporting redneck in town, there barefoot screaming kids, and wait in line for 15 minutes.
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I highly recommend everyone go to
http://www.walmartwatch.com »
and check it out...pretty eye-opening stuff about that company's practices. Also, there's a documentary out called "Wal-Mart: the high cost of low price" that I recommend. Me personally, I haven't been to a Wal-Mart in 6 years and counting. 😁
http://www.walmartwatch.com »
and check it out...pretty eye-opening stuff about that company's practices. Also, there's a documentary out called "Wal-Mart: the high cost of low price" that I recommend. Me personally, I haven't been to a Wal-Mart in 6 years and counting. 😁
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I do know from previous experience that Pioneer audio has a "special" line of products that are distributed at Wal-Mart. I am assuming they are manufactured to wally world specs which means cheap parts + cheap labor= cheap product. I do wonder how many companies have sub-par manufacturing for products sold at Wal-Mart stores.
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