Edwin Pawlowski wrote:

I have NO sympathy for suppliers to Wal Mart. The want the volume and
they willingly take a lot of crap from them. Thee is no obligation
to sell to any of the big tyrant stores. Do a Google search on
Vlasic pickles+WalMart and see how they were forced into bankruptcy
because they had no balls. The do a search on Snapper Mowers+WalMart
and see how a company can tell them to ****off and still be
successful. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/...n_snapper.html

For every supplier such as Snapper, there are 10,000 WalMart suppliers who
have listened to the experts from WalMart on issues such as packaging,
material sourcing, paperwork reduction, automation, improved technology, and
the like. The insistence, for example, by WalMart on RFID tags will drag
many suppliers into the modern age, just like supermarket chains did with
barcodes.

With sufficient RFIDs, you can bypass the time-consuming check out line. As
you leave Walmart, a sensor will scan all the stuff in your basket and read
the credit card numbers in your wallet.

That's efficiency.




My company faced a similar situation. We supplied parts to a major
manufacturer of room air conditioners. They were our largest
customer for a few years. Tough to deal with, we still made a fair
profit and they always tried to squeeze us for more. Before the
start of a season, they sent us (and all their suppliers) a letter
thanking us for past performance. They then said for the next year
they wanted a 25% price reduction for the same parts. Then, if we
agreed to that, they wanted a 6% rebate on the past years sales to
them.
We declined and asked where they wanted the tooling shipped. It went
to a hungry competitor that cheerfully took the business away from
us. Two years later, we had new and profitable customers, they had a
bankruptcy filing and the customer moved to Mexico and found new
cheaper suppliers there.