I used to love shopping at the old WalMarts. There are still a few of them around and I like their crowded aisle, general store, we-try-to-stock-a-few-of-everything feel.
I hate the supercenters. My first trip to one was filled with instances of not finding stuff I'd been buying at WalMart for years. The stores may be bigger and they've added groceries, but the selection has narrowed and prices increased. On top of that, the stores near here (NE Louisiana) have not figured out how to handle perishable food very well. Within weeks of opening, the meat and dairy areas stunk, and they still do.
I also dislike buying something made of fabric and something that's dripping blood at the same time. Keeping them separate in the buggy and at the checkout is more trouble than the supposed convenience of buying them in the same place at the same time. Where one convenience creates another inconvenience, there is little gain, perhaps a loss.
UPDATE:
For entirely different reasons and with much better reasoning, Professor Bainbridge sort of agrees with me:
It'll be interesting to compare CostCo's sales figures to those of Wal-Mart for the holiday season as a whole. If CostCo out-performs Wal-Mart on key retail metrics like average checkout price, sales per square foot, gross margin return on inventory, or same store sales, we'll have pretty good evidence for the proposition that it is product mix that is proving to be Wal-Mart's problem.
