Walmart committed to Project Impact, but may increase assortment
Source: Ad Age
There’s a legend circulating around Bentonville: Walmart Chairman Lee Scott enters a Friday morning senior-management meeting with two bags of groceries from Harps, the Arkansas retail chain that has somehow survived the dominance of its much bigger hometown rival.
The bags, the story goes, were filled with items Mr. Scott’s wife had purchased that week because she couldn’t find them at Walmart. The implication: The chain’s assortment cutbacks under so-called Project Impact to declutter aisles and make the shopping experience more upscale had gone too far.
Spokesman David Tovar said he could find no evidence of “anything quite so dramatic” happening at a senior-management meeting and said the story may have gained some details in the retelling. But he did acknowledge that assortment issues have been a management concern for the past nine months.
