Each organization on its own was not meeting the needs of their consumers which was reflected in their declining sales. The major issue for Sears is that after the market crash in 2008, the middle class shrunk and with it their clientele (Billups, 2011). With this change in the needs and desires of their customers, Sears and Kmart need to make transformative change to their organization. Transformative change is the most difficult for organizations to make because it does not allow for an overly controlled timeline and leadership must be able to react
Flat screens were entering the market in the mid-2000s and retailers were having a price war. Circuit City advertisements failed due to discounts not being advertised in a timely manner. Circuit City also failed due to its commission-based sales strategy, inventory cost due to the housing crisis, and the firing of many experienced employees. After Circuit City’s demise, Walmart started to increase the diversity in their electronics department. Walmart started to offer pay-as-you-go phone plans, competing with Best Buys Mobile.
The name of the company is Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. According to its official website, mission of the company is "Saving people money so they can live better", and its business type is retail, it sells the grocery items, household appliances, garments and other daily essentials directly to the customers. After a number of mishaps this multinational company managed to come through different public criticisms, and various stakeholders involved in the criticism such as top executives of Wal-Mart, its employees, suppliers, labour unions, and governments. One of specific criticism is Wal-Mart did not meet its part-time woker’s expectation with regards to a pay rise for minimum wage. For example, the figure from Bureau of Labour Statistics indicates
Is the strategy ethical? The strategy that Wal-Mart administers is not ethical as the item that is on the opening price point is only there to lure you onto other products. These other products may not be better priced than Wal-Mart’s competitors. 4. How did Wal-Mart address its falling sales in profits in the early 1990s?
• Domestic markets moving towards saturation • Domestic market (US) accounts for a small percentage of world’s population. • Walmart perception was discount retailing is essential for the developing economies and hence they achieve the double digit growth rates Advantages • Leverage local buying power with US based MNC’s. • Utilize competencies of efficient store management, technology & logistics. When Walmart expanded its business in the Britain, Germany and South Korea the following issues they faced and they failed to mitigate some problems in Germany and South Korea experienced the losses and finally pulled out the business from respective countries. Risks • Operational issues such as transportation and distribution logistics, supply chain, information technology and human resources.
But employees are not getting what they deserve. At Walmart, the average rate of payment to a cashier is $9.18 per hour and the manager gets $12.71 per hour with this much pay plan the employees can’t afford the rates of health insurance they provide. Walmart provides a high rate plan which covers very less. Also, according to the article, there was an incident noted in Bangladesh in which 11,000 people were killed due to the fire in the sub standardized building which was used to make Walmart products. So it means in some poor areas Walmart is not providing the safe space to work for their employees.
Walmart’s hard pill to swallow: Antidiscrimination Walmart, a US-based multinational retail corporation operating a chain of departmental stores, hypermarkets and grocery stores, is the world’s second largest public corporation. The corporation has faced the brunt of workplace prejudice allegations. Six women who worked for Walmart have sued the company for its inferior pay packages and promotion scope as compared to their male counterpart despite having better qualification, performance, and experience. According to these women’s 2010 court of appeals opinion, they were paid lesser than their male counterpart and had to wait longer for a promotion to an in-store management position. They demanded that Walmart must compensate its female workers who had been employed in the company since December 21, 1998 and were subjected to sexual discrimination.
The supermarket chain was ranked lower due to ineffective accounting and audit practices. In the year 2014 Tesco has faced worst crisis after an accounting bungle which lead to Britain’s biggest retailer overstating the expected profits of the business by £250m. it adversely affected the share prices of business which declined at faster pace. Due to this basic reason shareholders of company were disappointed and had negative impact on the brand image of business. Apart from this, the range of issues linked with corporate governance has adversely affected parties associated with Tesco where satisfaction level of investors, customers, suppliers etc have declined at faster
Nike is a clear example of a company whose previously unethical practices led to bad PR and motivated them to get involved in CSR. Similarly to Bowen’s concept of the evolution of CSR, Nike too has gone through an evolution that first started from profit focus, then progressed to community affairs, and finally to their now sustainable business (one of the carroll citations - not entirely sure if you’re supposed to put in citations twice though). In the 1990’s there was a lot of controversy surrounding Nike, this was mainly due to their profit focused initiatives and lack of ethics. Nike initially had hyper-growth in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. At this time, Nike outsourced the assembly of it’s products to third parties in Asia in order to both drive efficiency and lower labour costs.
European debt crisis has become a distinctive yellow alert, which cause many multinational enterprises faced challenges when running business. As affected by the crisis, companies slowed the recruitment, investment and expansion for business, economic activity decreased even more. For large multinational companies, the plight of the European market has resulted in the loss to them. Since the debt crisis started from 2009, many multinational companies in Europe, the United States or Japan were affected directly with some action such as retrench staff or restructuring. Even some of the company’s business still maintain a good momentum of development, but in accordance with foreign headquarters need to adjust the overall deployment, there are still many enterprises were shut down individual business, and related businesses to sell or exit from the market (The impact of the financial crisis on the Euro Area, 2008).