Stocks:  (WMT)(BBY)(TGT)

Retail sales for Wal-Mart may be flat on a same-store basis in December. So says the company.

Other chains had mixed results in November. Target beat Wall St.’s target with 5.9% same-store numbers. Costco was undercut, at 5% with 5.8% as the expected number.

Not much news here, but a lot of fruit for analysis.

What happened to Wal-Mart? No one has an adequate answer. Does it have too many stores and the saturation means that each store steal sales from the next? Is the competition to good? Target? Best Buy? Costco? Even Amazon?

Maybe the stores are too ugly and too down-scale. The company has been trying to fix that, but with no positive result so far. Or, maybe the management is crummy.

Lee Scott, WMT CEO, took over in early 2000. The company’s stock record over the last five years has been awful. WMT’s shares are off 15%. The S&P is up over 25%. Best Buy is up 80%. Target is up over 50%.

Scott has blundered, badly. He started with the world largest retailer. The company was growing at a terrific rate. But around 2002/2003, it slow down.

Management has done well at Wal-Mart. Nice pay. No results.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own shares in companies that he writes about.

Look for Jon Ogg’s WMT piece above.

Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.