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Let's not even compare K-Mart and Wal-Mart. It's like comparing a Ferrari to a Ford Probe.

Wal-Mart eats K-Mart for lunch. One of the main reasons that K-Mart is in chapter 11 right now is because it tried to go toe-to-toe with Wal-Mart, in the form of a price war. I'm not sure who at K-Mart thought of this, and I'm not sure who approved it. It was dumb and it put K-Mart in bankruptcy court. I think they have learned their lesson. K-Mart would be smart to take a cue from Target or Family Dollar and go after a different market segment than Wal-Mart does. K-Mart has the unfortunate position of being directly in Wal-Mart's line of fire, and that's not a good place to be.

In all the years of Wal-Mart, I've only known one company to go head-to-head with Wal-Mart and walk away a winner, and that was Coke. As you might remember, a few years ago Wal-Mart stopped selling Coke. Coke was complaining about poor shelf position (Sam's Cola was getting the prime merchandising spots on the shelf) and Wal-Mart's attitude was,
"Hey, we have Sam's Cola, we don't need you. Get lost." Coke said,
"All right, see ya soon." Not long after, Wal-Mart had to come back to Coke, hat in hand so they could get Coke back on the shelves.

Now, Wal-Mart is currently suing Visa for anti-trust violations (Wal-Mart claims that Visa is bundling illegally by requring that Wal-Mart take all Visa cards, including the ones that carry a higher than normal percentage of transaction fee. Most Visa cards carry a 2% fee per transaction that the retailer has to pay, but corporate cards and fleet cards and a few others carry a higher rate. Visa won't let Wal-Mart take just SOME Visa cards, so Wal-Mart is suing them for anti-trust/) and my speculation is that Visa will come out on top, and that'll be the second time that Wal-Mart has lost a toe-to-toe battle with another corporation.

I got off track, but I kind of like Wal-Mart--not to shop at, but as the ultimate acheivement of the American dream. Here's a guy, Sam Walton--ordinary guy like you and me, managed some Ben Franklin five-and-dime stores and a JC Penny in Arkansas. From absolutely nothing he built the largest corporation on the face of the Earth. Talk about Bill Gates all you want--if Walton was still alive, he would have WAY more money than Gates--plus Walton actually earned his money!

All in all, not bad for a guy who was told by everyone that a town with less than 30,000 people couldn't support a discount store very long. He was right, everyone else was wrong, and I love him for it.

I got off track, but to even compare K-Mart to Wal-Mart is nearly sacreligious.