Supply Chain

Wal-Mart to Increase Buying Clout

Oct. 13, 2010

A recent article in Business Week details how Wal-Mart is hoping to increase its profitability not through increased store sales but through supplier consolidation (READ deletion) and enhanced purchasing capacities (READ supplier price reductions). Why ...

Andrew R. Thomas Blog

A recent article in Business Week details how Wal-Mart is hoping to increase its profitability not through increased store sales but through supplier consolidation (READ deletion) and enhanced purchasing capacities (READ supplier price reductions).

Why would anyone with an innovative product or service ever consider selling those same innovations through a Mega-distributor like Wal-Mart?

Yet, flights to Bentonville are overbooked with representatives from innovative companies hoping to strike it rich and cut a blockbuster deal with Wal-Mart.

Click here to read more.

About the Author

Andrew R. Thomas Blog | Associate Professor of Marketing and International Business

Andrew R. Thomas, Ph.D., is associate professor of marketing and international business at the University of Akron; and, a member of the core faculty at the International School of Management in Paris, France.

He is a bestselling business author/editor, whose 23 books include, most recently, American Shale Energy and the Global Economy: Business and Geopolitical Implications of the Fracking Revolution, The Customer Trap: How to Avoid the Biggest Mistake in Business, Global Supply Chain Security, The Final Journey of the Saturn V, and Soft Landing: Airline Industry Strategy, Service and Safety.

His book The Distribution Trap was awarded the Berry-American Marketing Association Prize for the Best Marketing Book of 2010. Another work, Direct Marketing in Action, was a finalist for the same award in 2008.

Andrew is founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Transportation Security and a regularly featured analyst for media outlets around the world.

He has traveled to and conducted business in 120 countries on all seven continents.