The Wal-Mart Advantage

[Jolly]

During our mitigation phase, Wal-Mart's business has chugged along. IMO, because while other stores might be closed, people could buy paint, car batteries, toys, clothes, jewelry, knitting yarn, etc., along with your groceries.

[jon-nyc]

More than chugged along. Their stock hit an all-time high three weeks ago.

[George K]

@jon-nyc my retirement guy said the same thing about a month ago. He commented on Costco, Walmart and the like how they're doing well. However hospitality and transportation are in the toilet (at the time we talked he said that Marriott was about ⅓ of it's value in February.

[Jolly]

Wal-Mart had an unfair advantage. Other stores were non-essential and closed. Wal-Mart sold similar items, but could remain open because of their grocery business.

[George K]

@Jolly Target is the same. AFAIK, they never shut down the grocery-enabled stores.

[jodi]

@Jolly some stores roped the areas to those items off. Ours didn’t.

[Jolly]

@jodi said in The Wal-Mart Advantage:

@Jolly some stores roped the areas to those items off. Ours didn’t.

Ours did not.

And...The Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets, which are essentially grocery stores, still have some goods at Wal-Mart prices that regular grocery stores do not have or may have at much higher prices.

Motor oil and repair hardware (toilet kits, latex calk, screws, etc) come to mind.

[LuFins Dad]

In VA, we had Lowe’s, Home Depot, etc... open, and any retail store so long as they had under 10 people in the building was allowed to remain open. I think a lot of businesses didn’t understand Northam’s order and closed entirely. We had a lot of furniture stores stay open.