Walmart is huge, which is a good thing right? That's the American Dream to enjoy incredible success and to dominate the competition, but I think their business model is bad for their customers and bad for America.From my perspective Walmart carries all the basic common easy to handle high profit high volume items. Because of this they have taken the lion share of daily sales from many traditional department stores on which we used to rely on for specialized items. Before Walmart if you wanted to buy a hammer you went to a hardware store, if you needed food the grocery store, we relied on automotive shops, plant nurseries, sporting goods stores, and several other specialized stores.
The problem becomes apparent when you need to buy a low profit, low volume item like one specific size bolt, wing nut, or a washer for example. The hardware store while they used to perhaps make most of their money on hammers and fertilizer also stocked every size nut, bolt, screw, and washer. I think the little items were available as a courtesy that department stores offered which Walmart does not.
Walmart takes all the easy money by offering the high volume stuff and leaves all the inconvenient items to us to scavenge on our own from the last remaining department stores or online from China. With Walmart stealing all the hammer sales the hardware stores are forced out of business, the same goes for all the other types of department stores and our local access to quality low profit low volume items is lost forever.
