Tim Driscoll
Wal-Mart Foreign Expansion Case

Both of these readings were rather small, but they really gave a lot of information about Wal-Marts foreign expansion ventures and how those quite often didn’t work out too well. Germany and Korea being some of Wal-Mart’s biggest failures abroad, they are perfect examples of how Wal-Mart’s extremely Americanized and streamlined approach really doesn’t match the shopping habits of people around the world. Many different nations have developed extremely polar opposite methods and preferences when it comes to shopping, often in Europe buying at smaller more specialized stores and spending more for higher quality, and in Asian countries looking at pre-packaged foods like meat and fish as “sub-par” and “old”. These are just a few of the specific practices that made it extremely tough for Wal-Mart to enter these foreign markets with its current policies and methods of delivering product to the consumer, and ultimately some of the things that led to its failures in countries like Germany and South Korea. Where Wal-Mart found its stride internationally, though, was when it penetrated the international markets not by aggressively building and expanding stores, but when it purchased already established major competitors and slowly used them to alter the consumer culture in a country. Some prime examples of this are Mexico and Great Britain, where it bought current chains and used them to slowly start introducing Wal-Mart’s discount culture to the various demographics. If I were to evaluate Wal-Mart’s inherent capabilities of competing abroad, I would honestly not think they were too good. While Wal-Mart’s discount pricing and one-stop for everything culture meshes very well with the American style of living, a huge amount of countries across the globe do not agree with that style of consumer purchasing, and often times resent