Chapter OneWhy Aren’t Those Specials
Selling Today?
Elliott Masie
It was the day after Thanksgiving and all the boxes were stacked.
You know that Friday, the huge shopping day after the turkey is
digested, when citizens flock to stores and malls to start their search
for a great holiday gift. Throughout the United States, at Wal-Mart
stores, there was a “killer” combination special—a computer, mon-
itor, and printer at an extremely awesome price. Boxes of this
combo product were stacked, bar-coded, and ready to be taken
away by eager shoppers. Wal-Mart, an aggressive user of real-time
inventory control and predictive shopping models, had full
confidence that thousands of these high-tech bargains would leave
their stores across the country in the shopping basket of shoppers
that Friday.
We cut to Wal-Mart headquarters on Friday morning and look
over the shoulder of a merchandising manager. Something is
wrong! Very few of this product have been purchased throughout
the country, and stores have already been open for five hours, with
shoppers in every aisle. What could be wrong? He drills down to
the store-by-store sales data and finds a single store where people
have started to purchase this product after a few hours of no sales.
Perhaps there is a clue to this dilemma at that location. He picks
up the phone, calls the store, and hears this from the electronics
department manager:
For the first few hours, we had people looking at the boxes of
computers, but no one was buying. A couple of shoppers asked
me if there really was a computer, color monitor, and a printer in3