Why Wal-Mart Is Paying Me to Shop Their New Store

The day after tomorrow, our long-awaited $14 million Wal-Mart Supercenter opens its doors.

Finally.

It's been six years since Wal-Mart announced their intention to build a new store here in Pullman, Washington.

Most folks in town - consumers, business owners, civic leaders, etc. - welcomed Wal-Mart's announcement, anticipating a much-needed boost to our local economy directly and indirectly, as new businesses open nearby, seeking to benefit from all the new traffic brought in by the behemoth.

Predictably, a vocal minority of Wal-Mart haters - university profs and poseurs proposing to tell me where I should and should not spend my own money - mustered their troops and managed to delay the inevitable by a few years. Their polarizing antics cost our fair city several years' worth of tax revenues from Wal-Mart, estimated by some to be as much as $500,000 per year.

But that's all behind us now. Today, local residents received in the mail a five-dollar Wal-Mart gift card. No strings attached. Just activate your card, then come in and spend it like cash.

Can you think of a surer way to get people to come in and sample the store?

In 1923, Claude Hopkins - considered by many to be the father of modern advertising - wrote that "(t)he product itself should be its own best salesman. Not the product alone, but the product plus a mental impression, and atmosphere, which you place around it. That being so, samples are of prime importance. However expensive, they usually form the cheapest selling method."

So, Wal-Mart is tapping a tried-and-true technique to introduce local shoppers to their new Supercenter. What will happen? Customers by the thousands will enter the new store for the first time and redeem their $5.00 gift cards. One suspects that more than a few members of the anti-Wal-Mart crowd, despite their posturing, will be among them (though undoubtedly they'll limit their purchases to five bucks, just to give 'em what-for.)

Wal-Mart will measure the effectiveness of their "sampling" program by the tens, more likely hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional purchases made by these same customers this week, and in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

Wal-Mart's associates have received extensive training to ensure that they make each customer feel welcome, even special. Wal-Mart's consumer researchers and merchandise buyers have seen to it that their shelves are stocked with stuff people want to buy, at prices they're willing to pay.

To the extent that their customers' expectations are met or exceeded, the new Wal-Mart Supercenter will thrive. Call it capitalism, free enterprise, or laissez faire with a dash of caveat emptor, I wouldn't trade ours for any other system on earth.