Buyers flee empty Walmart shelves

Margaret Hancock has long considered the local Walmart superstore her one-stop shopping destination. No longer. During recent visits, the retired accountant from Newark, Delaware, says she failed to find more than a dozen basic items. The cosmetics section “looked like someone raided it,” said Hancock, 63.

Walmart’s loss was a gain for Kohl’s, Safeway, Target and Walgreen — the chains Hancock hit for the items she couldn’t find at Walmart. It’s not as though the merchandise isn’t there. It’s piling up in aisles and in the back of stores because Walmart doesn’t have enough people to restock the shelves, according to interviews with store workers.

In the past five years, the world’s largest retailer added 455 US Walmart stores, a 13% increase, according to filings and the company’s website. In the same period, its total US workforce, which includes Sam’s Club employees, dropped by about 20,000, or 1.4% Walmart employs about 1.4 million US workers. Disorganised Stores A thinly spread workforce has other consequences: longer check-out lines, less help with electronics and jewellery and disorganised stores, according to shoppers and workers.

Last month, Walmart placed last among department and discount stores in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the sixth year in a row it had either tied or taken the last spot. The dwindling level of customer service comes as Walmart has touted its instore experience to lure shoppers.

“Our in stock levels are up significantly in the last few years, so the premise of this story, which is based on the comments of a handful of people, is inaccurate and not representative of what is happening,” Brooke Buchanan, a Walmart spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement. “Two thirds of Americans shop in our stores each month because they know they can find the products they are looking for at low prices.”

Last month, Bloomberg News reported that Walmart was “getting worse” at stocking shelves, according to minutes of an officers’ meeting. An executive vice president had been appointed to work on the restocking issue, according to the document. Barren Landscape At the Kenosha, Wisconsin, Walmart where Mary Pat Tifft has worked for nearly a quarter-century, merchandise ready for the sales floor remains in steel bins lining the floor of the back room.

Meanwhile, the front of the store is increasingly barren, Tifft said. That landscape has worsened over the past several years as workers who leave aren’t replaced, she said.

Zeynep Ton, a retail researcher and associate professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says Walmart is entangled in the “vicious cycle” of under-staffing. Too few workers lead to operational problems. Those problems lead to poor store sales, which lead to lower labour budgets. “It requires a wake-up call at a higher level,” she said of the decision to hire more workers.