Wal-Mart's Stagnant Sales: Maybe People Just Don't Want More Crap from Foreign Countries?

It seems that employment is doing better but Wal-Mart is not seeing the results.

Wal-Mart U.S. CEO Bill Simon has remarked in interviews that the discount retailer isn’t seeing the gains in employment trickling down to the chain’s cash registers. Simon said to CNBC:

“I think the economic numbers – the unemployment numbers in particular – have been difficult to read with the number of people dropping out of the workforce. And I think it’s going to take a while – six months or more – for the numbers to balance out…. Hopefully after six years, we're starting to gain a little bit of traction and that traction is coming at the top end. I think the middle and down is still pretty challenged.”

I think it might be people are just tired of buying more and more crappy stuff for cheap from Wal-Mart. In fact I am hoping it is priorities changing among people in the US. Maybe they won't just go out and buy a ton of crap that sits in a room somewhere unused. Maybe the Great Recession is getting people to get more use out of the things they have.

I think one factor is if you walk around Wal-Mart you just see better options at other retailers. If you want clothes you can get something for a similar price at H&M, Old Navy, or American Apparel. If you want food you can get a better deal at Costco. If you need cold medicines and drugs Wal-Greens and CVS has deals all the time. Finally, if you need housewares or electronics then Amazon can give you all that for cheap.Wal-Mart is left in the middle where people just don't need 12 more wash cloths for $2.99 when they already have a brace of them.

At my local Wal-Mart there was a huge rack of 100s of bales of washcloths that almost no one is going to buy. All of them were probably made in Bangladesh or somewhere and are indicative of the quantity over everything maxim of Wal-Mart. I was like they can never sell all of these washcloths in a million years. I hoping the paradigm changes where Americans would rather have a few good washcloths or maybe just use some of them they bought a few years ago instead of simply buying that huge bale every few months.