February 14, 2008
Aaron
Lawrenceburg, IN

Steve,

Caught the last half of your show tonight and didn't get a chance to email you on the subject but I wanted to chime in on what you were saying about Walmart.

I work at our local Wal -Mart and have been there going on 6 years now. Since Christmas and a little before Christmas our store in particular have seen a dramatic cut in inventory that is stocked in the back room. I work in our electronics department and have been there since the start of my career there. In the past 4 to 5 years with electronics freight we have had ample supply of stock for all areas of electronics.

Now and definatly now our stock is way down. We have one and half bins three shelves high each for basic stock and the bottom section of the 2nd bin is for vendor movie stock. Our bigger merchandise like T.V., Computers and Stereo we us to half them in the back room in the general merchandise side of the store and they use to fill 5, eight feet bins completely full. Now we have them all stacked along a long hall way behind the dairy coolers on the grocery side of the store. I would say the footage would be about 50 long down the hallway where we keep.

Next, about the in stock issues. Point blank this is the worst I've seen it in the time I've been there. Granted it is tax time and people are buying stuff but the issue is when we place the orders it will either say a max quantity available to order is zero or it will only let order one or two items at a time. From my understanding of the ordering there at Wal - mart to is when I scan the item and it says lets say 4 in the ware house, then the whole district is fighting to get in them four items that the ware house has.

If you remember about a couple of years ago MSNBC did a documentary on Wal Mart and they talked about the inventory control to. It said that when an item is sold at the register it takes it from the time it is totaled out to home office in Arkansas about 15 minutes to make the adjustment and place the order for replenishment. So yeah all reports about the stores are being low just cause of inventory are to the latest just a side step. I'll admit its a little nice to have less stock to be able to inventory prep it for when our inventory comes. And speaking of that our inventory is scheduled for the first part of may. Last year it was in June and the year before was I think in May if I remember right .

Now as far as the grocery side I don't know nothing about it over there but I can pick and choose a couple of items and track it for a week or two on sales and replenishments on it to.

I hope that helps and if you want you can pick and choose or read all for the show and keep up the good work. Feel free to chime back if you wanna.