2007-11-03, Walmart: Muscling Manufacturers 沃尔玛困局（在线收听） |
| I wanted to see how this bold new world of retail power it changed the game for established brand-name manufacturers, so I headed to Wooster, Ohio, a small college town, and a long-time home to one of the American's best known brands - Rubbermaid, maker of plastic pails, garbage cans and all kinds of containers. "We were one of the best-known brand names in America, because we were in virtually every home one way or another. " Very very impressive display here. Well, these are ... Stanley Gault was CEO of Rubbermaid for the 1980s and early 90s. Gault bet Rubbermaid's future on supplying big box discount chains like Wal-mart. The tea leaves said "You'd better be a part of this growing, of these growing new segments", they provided a tremendous opportunity for a growth and for volume sales, and they can take a new product and make it a success overnight. One of Gault's rising lieutenants was Wolfgang Schmitt, who would later become CEO. Well, there is a dramatic shift over, over a relatively short period of time, as we went from thousands of customers that we were selling to. To where 5 or 7 of our customers represented two thirds of our volume. These big box retailers? The big box mass merchants. You have to have a very tight relationship with them, and you have to be important to them. No customer was more important to Gault than Wal-mart. When I came to Rubbermaid, er, they didn't sell Wal-mart, they were selling K-mart, but they wouldn't sell Walt-mart. Well, within a short period of time, Walt-mart, really, within a year they were our largest customer. Tired of dragging your garbage to the end of the drive, then roll it, with a roughneck wheeled refuse container from Rubbermaid. Heavy-duty construction… The Wal-mart account helped fuel Rubbermaid's rapid growth. Sales and profits soared. Rubbermaid, ideas that last. Its products were so highly regarded for quality that Rubbermaid was voted the nation's most admired company in 1994. It is really your peer group, the other manufacturers out there in the world saying, this is the company that is really doing it, they are doing all the things right, and they are doing the things that make them very admired, our brand-name, our quality, our product development. But behind the headlines, Rubbermaid was struggling to maintain its ambitious growth targets, then suddenly it found itself in a showdown with its biggest customer. The price of resin skyrocketed and resin is a huge component of any plastic product that you make. And when we went out with a price increase across the industry, to all retailers, saying, our raw material costs have increased significantly, we have to get a price increase for our products. Wal-mart would not take that price increase. They flat-out refused to take the price increase. Other mass retailers agreed to a price hike and Rubbermaid CEO flew to Arkansas to ask Bill Fields, head of Wal-mart's stores, to reconsider. They were very public in those days as you might recall, as were a lot of retailers about saying one of the advantages we as big box-retailer dealers have is we can put the hammer to the manufacturers and we can give American consumers lower prices. So did Fields put the hammer to you? Oh, in his own way, certainly. I thought it was a vindictive kind of meeting that said, "Yes, you may be Rubbermaid, and you are a big Rubbermaid, and you/ got the great name and all that, but you are not gonna tell us what to do, and we are not gonna take your price increase and we really don't care what it does to you. So what does it mean to you? Do you lose shelf-space, do you lose volume to Wal-mart, at that point? Sure, you know, when push comes to shelf, their way of disciplining the supplier, is to show that you know volume can be given or it can be taken. And they dropped a number of our products for a couple of years, just drop those products, that impacts the company tremendously. To me it was one of the first signs of the decline of Rubbermaid. |
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