NEW YORK – Wal-Mart is in a race against time to give the people what they want before they get comfortable shopping elsewhere.
Shoppers who switched to other stores when Wal-Mart decided to ditch best-selling toothbrush brands, craft supplies and bolts of fabric may be hard to win back.
The company has taken nine months to restore thousands of grocery items, including some bestselling brands, it dumped from its shelves two years ago. The idea was to tidy up stores for the wealthier customers it had won during the recession.
Grocery sales have improved, rising in the low single digits in the first quarter. But overall traffic at its U.S. namesake stores has been down, and revenue at stores open at least a year has posted eight straight quarters of declines on a year-over-year basis.
Wal-Mart says it will take until the end of the year to restock the rest of the stores with items that were culled, from craft supplies to home furnishings. That will go a long way toward restoring Wal-Mart’s ability to provide one-stop shopping, which could be a plus as shoppers make fewer trips to save on gasoline.