I visited one of the Walmart’s branches where I got to spend about two hours observing how activities are being done in the retail store. Walmart has been operating for many years, and it has been successful in its operation. The retail store not only gets its success from selling affordable goods, but also from giving million of people a chance to live better (Courtemanche & Carden, 2011). I was able to observe a number of things in the store. The organization of commodities in the store is carried out perfectly. It is very easy to locate the item required. The essential products that are frequently purchased, such as the food and other items are found on the ground floor. Getting such products does not require one to go to other floors. Hence, this makes them easily available. I noticed that the all the employees were busy. Each and every employee was doing something, such as arranging products on the shelves, talking to the consumers, supervising activities or serving consumers at the cash register. I never saw anyone idle or walking up and down without a purpose. When I moved near the shelves to stare at the items, the display was appealing to my eyes. I realized that the products were well displayed, and the all of them had a price tag. The price tags of the products were clearly written even a person with the slight eyesight problem can tell the amount. The stores are always termed as discount stores. There were big tags near the products, notifying the customer the amount of cash they will save if they decide to purchase the commodity from the store compared to other stores. The figures on the tags were written with big writings that customers could spot from a distance. It was easy to distinguish the employees of the store from the other customers because they were dressed in attires that match the color of the store. This made it easy to spot them.
The first good thing is that the staff were very friendly. They were busy attending to the customers in the store. I notice that the conversations between the employees and customers were good because I could see some customers leaving smiling, and once they have been attended to, they purchase the products. The stores are reducing the standard of living. I make this point from the fact that most of the products in the store are affordable. If not affordable then they are cheaper compared to those sold in other stores (Liu, Zhang, Bu & Xiao, 2012). I realized what makes the products cheap is the discount being given to all the products. The stores had many customers. I could see people on every shelf. Out of the total time I spent in the store, there was no time the number of customers went down. The reason for the stores being flooded with the customers is because of the discount being given on all products that makes them cheap. The employees were not fixed to one particular job or station apart from the ones who were at the cash register. They were flexible and could move from one station to another. This is good in a work environment because it helps to reduce boredom or monotony. Boredom and monotony are the things that reduce job motivation of the employees. Apart from the job flexibility, I was told that there was job rotation. This is information I got from one employee who never wanted to be mentioned in the report.
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A business cannot be perfect all round. This is even the case with the store I visited. The first problem I noticed in the store is that the store is understaffed. The number of employees in the store was very less. If we compare the number of customers to employees, the customers we very many compared to the staff. This made some customers not to get the help they were looking to get when they were near the shelves. The other negative thing about the store is that the diversity of the employees was not observed. The majority of individuals working in the store were white, yet the store was located closer to an area populated by the black Americans (Courtemanche & Carden, 2011). This will make me conclude that there is racial discrimination being practiced by the Human Resource department. There should be gender, race, and ethnic balance when it comes to the employment practice. The store I visited seems to be a bit small compared to the things that were inside and the customers who were visiting it. Most things were squeezed together. They tried to fit many things within the store. The customers who were within the store were also very many. This made many cash registers to have long queues. Queueing is not liked by many customers. This makes the store lose some customers to the neighboring competitors. We are going to open our new store in order to out-compete the store that I visited. I know Walmart is a big store, and this gives me doubt whether we will succeed in our aim of beating it in the area, but we are going to try it in the coming days and we will succeed. There is nothing impossible in this earth. Everything is possible.
- Courtemanche, C., & Carden, A. (2011). Supersizing supercenters? The impact of Walmart
Supercenters on body mass index and obesity. Journal of Urban Economics, 69(2), 165-181. - Liu, X., Zhang, S., Bu, K., & Xiao, B. (2012, October). Complete and fast unknown tag identification in large RFID systems. In Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), 2012 IEEE 9th International Conference on (pp. 47-55). IEEE.
