Special Reports Archive

Senior Walmart executives regularly invoke the name of Sam Walton when it serves to reinforce a point regarding the company’s business model or the cultural principles on which Walton is said to have founded the company. Dr. John Agwunobi, president of health and wellness for Walmart U.S., took the practice a step further recently when he participated in a panel presentation with other top executives at a conference put on by the Center for Retailing Excellence at the University of Arkansas’ Sam M. Walton College of Business.



With its latest string of initiatives designed to bring it out of a slump that lasted more than a decade, Rite Aid is aiming for “wellness” to do for it what the lower-case “i” did for Apple.


First, there was the wellness+ loyalty card program. Then, there was the wellness store format, with its team of Wellness Ambassadors. “This new format is all about empowering our customers in their pursuit of wellness,” president and CEO John Standley said in the company’s first quarter 2012 earnings call on June 23.



The 19th century British writer William Hickson may have written, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again,” but he only had half the story. By all means, try again, but don’t do the same thing over and over and expect different results.



Since its nationwide launch in April 2010, Rite Aid’s wellness+ loyalty card program rapidly has proven itself to be a phenomenal boost to the chain’s business as the first-ever loyalty program designed to enhance customers’ savings and well-being together.



When Rite Aid chairman Mary Sammons accepted the Sheldon W. Fantle Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Association of Chain Drug Stores’ Annual Meeting in Scottsdale, Ariz., in May, it was the culmination of a career that had seen Rite Aid emerge from a period of darkness that had lasted more than a decade.


Sammons plans to stay on as chairman of Camp Hill, Pa.-based Rite Aid until the company’s annual meeting in June 2012. But when she does hang up the gloves, she will have a lot to look back on.


Happy days are here again! Consumer confidence rebounded 1.6 points in April from a dip in March, according to the Consumer Confidence Index, despite the fact that high-gas-price stories are dominating the airwaves. That suggests consumers may be willing to try new things again — in other words, to buy something new — and that is excellent news for niche manufacturers.

The 59-year-old Save Mart supermarket chain more than doubled its store count in 2007 with the purchase of 132 Albertsons stores, but entered something of a dormant period since then. Save Mart now operates 241 stores in California and Nevada, down from a peak of 255 in 2009, and 114 in-store pharmacies, down from 115 in 2009.



Shopko’s story is sort of like a retailing version of “The Little Engine that Could.” Among mass merchandise retailers, it’s one of the smaller and less well-known chains, but that hasn’t stopped it from making its mark, particularly in new health-and-wellness and pharmacy initiatives.