Dive Brief:
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An impressive number of millennials have shopped at Wal-Mart, according to the retailer’s chief merchant Steve Bratspies, Fortune reports.
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Speaking at an analysts conference this week, Bratspies said that some two-thirds of Americans age 20 to 35 have shopped at a Wal-Mart in the last month, and are more likely to shop there than the general population.
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The company’s own research found that Wal-Mart’s market share among millennial mothers rose 4.5% percentage points over the last two years.
Dive Insight:
Millennials are getting older, having families and signing mortgages. While as a group they’ve always been budget-minded, they’re now hunting for deals on the kinds of things you find at Wal-Mart, like diapers and other household goods.
This comes at a time when millennial brand loyalty as emerged as a complicated subject. It’s true that prices have been the major reason that millennials might switch brands; they came of age during one of the country’s worst recessions and that apparently continues to influence them.
Wal-Mart and its “always low prices” ethos fits well in that picture, then. As Phil Wahba at Fortune states, Wal-Mart could be capturing millennials’ interest at just the right moment, when they’re solidifying their loyalty (and perhaps staying put in their new houses in the suburbs).
But millennials’ penchant for ordering online may not be the perfect thing for the retailer. Bratspies noted that millennials, in addition to being frugal, are also true omnichannel shoppers, which could boost the retailer’s efforts to increase its e-commerce sales. Brick-and-mortar is its forte, and the logistics that it has pretty much perfected over the years is centered around that. E-commerce is a different game, and may not really be in Wal-Mart’s wheelhouse.
“They want to shop Walmart, they don’t care if it’s online, they don’t care if it’s mobile, they don’t care if it’s in the store,” Bratspies said, according to Fortune.
The inefficiencies of e-commerce could change up Wal-Mart’s “always low prices” feature—and that could send the millennials who’ve drifted to it elsewhere.