ORIGINAL: silentassassin
Don't get me wrong, I'm no big Walmart fan, but Walmart never ran a small business out of business. Consumers choices and the inability of some small business to adapt had a hand in their demise. No one forces (thank God) shoppers to go to Walmart over another store and Nobody says small business can't adapt. It's called Capitalism! Sink or Swim.
Well Walmart has certainly contributed. Walmart has a policy of not paying their debts until the last second that they can pay them and sometimes after (time value of money etc). But many distributors stake their lively hood on Walmart picking up their product. However, once Walmart picks up their product they have had to go hugely in debt to afford the initital production costs. Several have gone out of business waiting on Walmart to pay them cause after all what are they going to do, quit selling to WalMart?
I hope you don't think Walmart is the only company out there that does this. Work with ANY company...........even on levels no where near Walmart and you will see this. Paying your bills at the last second keeps your money in your pocket as long as possible.
The key difference.........which you pointed out..........is that Walmart enjoys the luxury of knowing companies won't cut them off and even if they did there is 100 in line behind them begging for a chance to get abused.
My brother works for a Fortune 500 computer distribution company. They deal with smaller companies because Microsoft doesn't want to. His accounts are STAPLES, Office Max, Office Depot and he had BUY.com (don't know if they still exist). He has to deal with invoices for millions of dollars that these companies just flat out say they are only gonna pay a fraction of.............it comes down to a choice in the end. Take $700,000 and keep STAPLES 33 million a year or tell them to go fly a kite and lose 33 million over $300,000. Smaller companies they just tell to pay up or they are cut off............big companies with big accounts receivable get away with murder.........because they know they can.
Money talks........and Walmart has it all.