E-Sourcing Forum » Do as Wal-Mart does

Do as Wal-Mart does

March 19th, 2008 at 08:05am David Bush - Iasta

If you thought blogging was goofy, think again. SCDigest alerted me to a new corporate blog by Global #1 (or was that Public Enemy #1?). The Wal-Mart blog, named Check-out, “are buyers or merchandisers in a number of product categories (e.g., “gadgets” or “lawn and garden”) who went through detailed training in how to blog effectively and, one assumes, guidelines on what not to write.”

SCDigest is somewhat critical of the output, noted that there is very little supplier critiquing going on. By reading the posts, I agree with this but never saw anywhere on the blog that this was to be the mission.

Ultimately, they raise a good point about ripping suppliers in the open.

It’s unrealistic to expect retail corporate buyers to aggressively critique vendor offerings, for at least three reasons: (1) they would be critiquing the merchandise they had decided to stock on store shelves; (2) vendors would go ballistic over unfavorable reviews; and (3) it could potentially impact Wal-Mart sales revenue – which simply isn’t going to happen.

We have a number of progressive clients that use an internal wiki or bulletin board to post and share best practices or protocols. Information about supply bases can and should be shared on this internal resource.

It will be interesting to see what Wal-Mart does with this forum. The guy that writes on sustainability had some interesting topics. But, like the rest, the entries were more product reviews, and of course, everything is meant to look like water cooler conversation, so you have a hard time believing the genuine nature of it all.

Email Forward & Bookmarks

Close this Window Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks

Email This to a Friend

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Entry Filed under: General, Supply Management Best Practices

1 Comment Add your own

1. Natasha Green | March 29th, 2010 at 1:13 pm

This is indeed a very interesting post. I guess it will be interesting to see how Wal-Mart takes this and uses for its advantage.
Blogging is definitely not Goofy!

Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed