Wal-Mart Is About To Get Much Bigger

"Before getting into groceries, starting in 1986, Wal-Mart figured that a typical store needed a potential customer base of at least 150,000 people. But add groceries, and more of the available shoppers show up; each store needs a smaller area to support it. So Wal-Mart can situate Supercenters less than 5 miles apart in many suburban areas. It is also deploying a cut-down grocery-convenience store called the Neighborhood Market between the superstores. At the same time, Wal-Mart is adding merchandise categories, such as gasoline, Linux computers and flat-screen TVs, in which it can take prices down significantly.... The company calls the program the "store of the community." The principle is as old as shopping: customers differ significantly depending on where they live, what they earn and other factors. But the differences are far subtler than anyone ever imagined. The company has been analyzing every purchase made over the past 10 years, looking at the relationships between the items people buy and hundreds of other variables such as time of day and price... According to an independent study by McKinsey & Co., Wal-Mart's efficiency gains were the source of 25% of the entire U.S. economy's productivity improvement from 1995 to 1999."