Walmart Going After Beer Market

Walmart Stores Inc. is reportedly seeking to double its sales of alcohol. According to a report in Bloomberg News, the retail giant hosted an “adult beverage summit” at its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters last year, telling alcohol suppliers it wanted to focus on increasing its share of the $45 billion U.S. beer market.

In that time, says Bloomberg, “the company has doubled the number of alcohol buyers to 12 and offered discounts on a range of brands, from mainstream Coors to such craft beers as Deschutes. It ditched slow-selling products to make way for beer and is even selling it in garden centers. New stores are designed to put the suds front and center.”

Walmart now promotes alcohol in its circulars, reversing a previous ban from the more conservative era of founder Sam Walton. Two of Walton’s grandsons even spearheaded a campaign to overturn a ban on retail alcohol sales last year in Walmart’s home county of Benton.

“Focusing on adult beverage is a decision we made this year,” Deisha Barnett, a Walmart spokeswoman, told Bloomberg News. “Feedback has been very positive” and the relationship with distributors “has been very collaborative.”

At the summit meeting, Walmart chief merchandising officer Duncan Mac Naughton laid out a three-prong plan: devote more shelf space to alcohol and do a better job promoting it; discount wherever possible; and hire more alcohol buyers and reduce the size of their territories so they can interact more often with distributors.

“They’re redesigning stores to have adult beverage in a more appealing position in the front of the store near produce,” Amy Baldwin, a marketing director for liquor distributor Gulf Distributing Holdings LLC (Mobile, Ala.), told Bloomberg.