Walmart Blames Q1 Sales Slump on 3D Printers

[Anonymous]

Walmart Blames Q1 Sales Slump on 3D Printers 

Walmart Blames Q1 Sales Slump on New Consumer Technology
by Nikki Baird

Walmart’s woes continue as more leaked emails reveal a growing concern among company executives over a new consumer technology that promises to completely disrupt the mass merchant’s business model. While retailers like Best Buy struggle to combat showrooming and retailers like JCPenney appear to be failing miserably at redefining the future of the store, Walmart’s greatest threat appears to be the next generation of 3D printers known as “replicators.”

3D printers have begun making a splash on the retail scene, as RetailWire noted in March. At the time, industry pundits believed the technology in its infancy, but a recent breakthrough has changed the game.Since 2005, MIT scientist and certified physics genius Neil Gershenfield, director of the University’s Center for Bits and Atoms, has been working on technology that replicates the concept first demonstrated in a Star Trek episode. Using replicators, shoppers could take basic matter components and create everything from apples to zucchini. However, it’s not just fresh items that could be impacted by the new technology – every consumer packaged good from chips to soda could be reconstituted, down to the design details on the package.

Neil calls his invention a “fab” but clearly, Star Trek fans will override his lack of a sense of future history and rename it “replicator” for him. But it’s unclear at this time if intellectual property owner Paramount will sue as a result.

Neil’s breakthrough was not ready for a public announcement, but ended up exposed after a wild party at the local Alpha Chi Sigma chapter, a self-professed physics fraternity, was broken up by police. Investigators were initially baffled by a plethora of red Silo cups and inebriated college students, but no evidence of any beer kegs. Further inquiry revealed that a household appliance police had initially mistaken as a coffee maker was actually a prototype of the replicator concept.

Among certain retailers, chaos ensued. In a leaked email chain, Walmart executives can best be described as “freaking out”: As one senior executive yelled (we removed the all-caps formatting for easier readability), “We have spent millions of dollars – no billions – optimizing our supply chains and now one little jumped-up 3D printer promises to make our whole business model obsolete.”

Target appears unconcerned. In a statement issued by their press office, the company offered this rationale: “Our partnerships with famous designers – and a lot of them you’ve never heard of – protects us from encroachment by futuristic technologies that are still largely infeasible. Who makes money in a gold rush? The guy selling picks and shovels. With our design ownership, we’re positioned to be the shovel-seller of the replicator gold rush.”

Greenpeace has declined to comment on whether replicating items down to the molecular level qualifies as “genetic modification”, stating that they need to see it in action before they can issue an official statement. Are you still reading this article? I’m just curious because I am admittedly rather literal minded, but during this time of year I find myself particularly cautious about bold announcements because I’d prefer to avoid being taken in if I can avoid it.

My children have the same trusting instinct that I do – last year I convinced them that they had to go to school on April 1st (it was their spring break, and they dutifully got up, got dressed, and started off to school while I laughed at them), and this year I suggested that they would have to go to school today, fully expecting them to be on guard, but instead they believed me: hook, line and sinker. I actually had to relent yesterday because my son was so upset about the fact that he had somehow missed an entire week of spring break (they get two) that I couldn’t deal with his bad attitude long enough to get him out the door with his backpack for school this morning.

I hope to at least inspire a little more caution on their part, if not fully break their rush to trust even their parents before I send them off to high school. But I do so with the hope that one of them may actually invent a replicator. I’m still awaiting word on whether Neil has started human trials, thus converting his replicator into a transporter. By the way, if you avoided the links above, I highly recommend you check them out.

Public Profile
Nikki Baird

    Although Ms. Baird writes on issues for big retailers and company chains, franchisees can learn what is leading edge in retailing trends. These issues will be coming down the pike, if they aren’t there already.

    Managing Partner of Retail Systems Research, Nikki has led retail research and analysis at RSAG. Forrester Research, Viewlocity,and PwC Consulting, now IBM Global Services. Nikki has an M.B.A. from the University of Texas, Austin and holds a bachelor of arts in political science and Russian, with a minor in physics.

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April 11, 2013 at 8:15 AM