I don't get it.
Unless they have the capacity to be a GLOBAL SUPPLIER, your friends have to be CRAZY to do business with Wal-Mart.
It's simple - here is the reason why:
Quote:
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As of October 31, 2004, the Company had 1,362 Wal-Mart stores, 1,671 Supercenters, 550 SAM’S CLUBS and 76 Neighborhood Markets in the United States. Internationally, the Company operated units in Argentina (11), Brazil (147), Canada (241), China (39), Germany (92), South Korea (16), Mexico (656), Puerto Rico (54) and United Kingdom (276).
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When you do business with Wal-Mart, you're not doing it with just one store, or even all the stores in the state or even in one region. You're supplying to the whole damn company, with billions of potential consumers, hundreds of thousands of SKU's and
$256.3 BILLION in global sales!
Your friends should have seen that coming. If they couldn't handle the scale required by Wal-Mart - they should not even have botheredk knowing that a global supplier would be picked to handle the demand! Global volume = huge discounts (fixed costs spread out over a lot of volume).