June 11, 2019
Tuesday AM

The local Wal-Mart has stopped carrying Kleenex brand nose tissues, apparently in favor of its own preferred generic brand. Reminds me of an old saw I was told about my grandparents one day back in the 1930s when my grandfather brought home from the store a substitute type of toilet paper, “Northern Pine.” Next morning, so the story goes, Grandma came a mumbling and a grumbling down the stairs, “Northern Pine. Northern Pine. Everything but the splinters.”

I can’t really say that “Great Value,” Wal-Mart’s store brand, is going to lead to a chapped nose faster come a cold than Kleenex; haven’t done that test yet; so for the moment that is just an assumption, but while one could submit that it is not polite to force buying choices on your customers, I would simply observe that the preferred brand is available elsewhere, and for a box of Kleenex sending your customers to someone else’s store is rather stupid.

When in addition, as I assessed about three months ago, the prices for the items I routinely buy have already gone up 9% or more, and this before your threatened increases because of Trump’s tariffs, and you are apparently incapable of keeping your shelves stocked, I do have to wonder if you give even a tinker’s damned about your customers. (Inflation has increased under Trump from the 1.9% average for all the years of the Obama administration to just short of 2.2%, in other words a trifle, so how you begin to get 9% and counting out of that is curious.)

Hey, inventory department, tourists spend bucket loads at Wal-Mart, and leave the shelves bare of any number of basic items. Seasonality is not an uncommon attribute of inventory management, so stocking more for peak season is a basic managerial requirement which you folks seem to have chosen to ignore.

Right now and for the past six weeks I have been short 30% to 40% of the items I routinely buy at Wal- Mart, which means I bought those things elsewhere. At a point what is the point of doing business with you if you are unwilling to even bother to re-stock your shelves?

David G Hanger
Ketchikan, Alaska

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The text of this letter was NOT edited by the SitNews Editor.

Received June 07, 2019 - Published June 11, 2019

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