How central is [the opening price point] to Wal-Marts marketing strategy?
It’s the heart of Wal-Mart’s pricing strategy. Wal-Mart puts [a] tremendous amount of planning, organization and thinking into what their opening price points are going to be, based on last year’s sales, based on customer requests, what’s in demand this year, what’s the newest, hottest item on the market. Based on bar code information? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. When you say they put [in] tremendous effort, what does that mean? When you’re a store manager, are you generating extra displays? Are you getting extra shipments? What does it mean when they’ve picked a few items as opening-price items for a season? Well, you have to look at the days of Sam Walton. Sam had an old Ford pickup truck, and he’d go down the road and buy ladies’ panties and sell them at a ridiculously low price — you know, 10 for a buck or something like that back in his day. … Did Sam Walton talk about opening price points? Oh, yeah. That was his idea. It was his idea? That was his idea, yeah: Let’s get the hot
