[maui_hawaii]

No Wal Mart monopoly, but they definately practice Return on Investment. Do you bring in 10,000 people to make $1m dollars, or do you bring in 8,000, but with higher prices and make the same $1m?

Isn't it cheaper and easier to deal with less people, but still make your profits?

[AIG]

Wal-Mart's return on investment is fine as it is. Plus, higher pricing might defeat Wal-Mart's strategy of undercutting competitors in the first place. Wal-Mart's strategy is to be the low-cost producer which means to simultaneously undercut and defeat and take market share from competitors while generating a perfectly adequate profit for itself. If Wal-Mart's prices were higher, it might not be able to exploit the durable competitive advantage of being the low-cost producer, which is what guarantees that Wal-Mart will stay in business for the long-term.

[AIG]

By getting stuff from China at a cheap price and then selling it to US consumers at a cheap price and taking the difference as its profit, Wal-Mart has an unbeatable system to consistently both defeat its competitors and generate a stable profit for itself long into the future. Other companies have started to replicate Wal-Mart but by now Wal-Mart has the additional competitive advantage of size which allows it to source products from China even more cheaply and beat out competitors in the US for store locations, distribution deals, etc.