Madden 2013 Walmart Style

This coming Monday night, Walmart gaming departments will be running a Madden '13 tournament in their 2500+ locations across the country that are open 24 hours.

Tournaments are slated to begin on Monday evening, August 27th at 9 p.m. From what employees are saying customers will be playing each other with the ultimate winner receiving a copy of Madden NFL 13 for their efforts.

Some Walmart locations are doing things a little differently. In the picture on the right, this location is having a Triva contest with 13 questions. From those contestant who get all questions answered correctly  a drawing will be held with four prizes being awarded

1. Grand Prize Winner receives a copy of Madden NFL 13
2. First price is  a Wilson NFL Football
3. Second Prize is a backyard grill with Gridiron Tool set
4. Third prize is a Tailgating bean bag toss

Walmart claims to be a leader in new releases in entertainment, it will be interesting to see what the customer response is for this title.

TV's Made in America?

Minneapolis based Element Electronics this past January announced that they would begin assembling larger screen TVs in a plant outside of Detroit with production slated to begin in March.

The first of these "American" made TVs started showing up in Target stores in early July from what I recall. However, this past week Walmart stores began featuring this product out in the aisles of select stores in Michigan.

Check out the flags around the sign holder and the red, white and blue Flag scheme on the TV box with the tagline, "America Matters." While this packaging may seem ironic for a retailer that brings in so many of its products from Asia, it does address a part of Walmart's pledge to use local sourcing when it is possible.

While some customers may find this appealing that a TV is being made in the US again (the last US built TVs were back in the late 80s early 90s), Walmart employees do not express high praise for these products.

Target Say's Me Too to Larger TV's

While Walmart has made the most noise since this last spring with its assortment changes in TVs, number two mass merchant Target is doing some of its own as well.

At the right is a picture of a 70" Sharp LED (backlight) TV at a Target store in Lansing, Michigan. 70" TV's are common at the likes of specialty electronics retailers like Best Buy, Fry's, hhgregg and BrandsMartUSA. While one can even find these at the clubs, it was only this past April that Walmart added 70" TVs as an all store item.

Why is this such a big deal for Target? Look at the in store selection of TVs there and you will see that their typical assortment is 50- 75% of a typical Walmart. While the space this will take up is a big investment, having the Beast from Bentonville (AR) be ahead of them may simply be too much to bear.

Walmart Adds More Entertainment

Wow, it's been far too long since the last post and there is a lot going on, shame on me.

Over the last year, Walmart has been increasing comp sales, driving more traffic and seeing a rather interesting run up in their stock price. One of the main drives of this success according to Walmart's top brass is the addition of nearly 10,000 products back into the store assortment.

While most of the past year this expansion has been observed mostly in food, the entertainment department is now getting its fair share of new and added products showing up.

In the example at right, one can see the updated networking area for this retailer. What's been reduced? The number of wired Ethernet cables which used to be totally Belkin"ized". In their place are private label ONN wired networking products (the power of higher margins from the company's' global sourcing initiative) and more wireless routers.

Over last year, the assortment of wireless product has nearly doubled with more SKU's from Belkin, Netgear and Cisco. Additions for this year include wireless range extenders from Netgear and Cisco.

Want to see another quick example, pop over to the section that has computer mice as that assortment has more than doubled with the addition of Dark Field laser (Logitech, $49) and mice that can be used as scanners ($99).