Wal-Mart Chief Writes Off New York. - NYT

[MattSh]

Wal-Mart to New York: fuhgeddaboudit.

Frustrated by a bruising, and so far unsuccessful battle to open its first discount store in the nation’s largest city, Wal-Mart’s chief executive said yesterday, “I don’t care if we are ever here.”

H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive of the nation’s largest retailer, said that trying to conduct business in New York was so expensive — and exasperating — that “I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”

Mr. Scott’s remarks, delivered at a meeting with editors and reporters of The New York Times, amounted to a surprising admission of defeat, given the company’s vigorous efforts to crack into urban markets and expand beyond its suburban base in much of the country. In recent years, Wal-Mart has encountered stout resistance to its plans to enter America’s bigger cities, which stand as its last domestic frontier.

Much of the opposition to Wal-Mart in cities like New York is led by unions. Organized labor, fearing that the retailer’s low prices and modest wages will undercut unionized stores, have built anti-Wal-Mart alliances with Democratic members of city councils.

Yesterday, labor leaders, upon learning of Wal-Mart’s apparent retreat from New York — or at the very least Manhattan — returned Mr. Scott’s sentiment.

“We don’t care if they’re never here,” said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council. “We don’t miss them. We have great supermarkets and great retail outlets in New York. We don’t need Wal-Mart.”

Continued at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/business/28retail.html?hp

[XanaDUer]

1. Heh,

I love ny.

[liberal N proud]

2. Maybe Wal-Mart has pushed past it's peak

Maybe they will need to realize they can't own the entire market.

[ClintonTyree]

3. Ahhh, but the rest of the world is fast becoming....

Wal*Mart's oyster. The new Wal*Mart business plan is to expand outside of the U.S., to flood the rest of the world (including the Chinese themselves) with the promise of "lower prices: always". Whether they'll succeed or not remains to be seen. They don't have the greatest reputation. Or so I hear. ;)

[Terri S]

4. The headline should have read

NY to Walmart-- FUCK YOU!! Anywhere you go in the city, in the gazillion retail stores or the ubiquitous street fairs, you can get better prices and better quality anything at all than you'll ever find in a f'ing Walmart. They may be able to push their weight around anywhere else, but ya gotta laugh to think they'd ever get anywhere with NY'ers.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. Two words: sour grapes.