Meijer Today

While I couldn’t make it to the Loosemore Auditorium to hear the Meijer speaker, I still found it interesting to hear the summary in class. Meijer is a $10 billion dollar a year business, and they consider themselves a small business in the industry that they are in. This is crazy to me, because that sounds like a very large business, but I suppose it’s who you compare yourself to. The speaker used the examples of the elephant and target as their competition.

Meijer finds it very important to have good vendor/supplier relationships. They have found that today’s customers are less impressed with the big promotions of high/low pricing, and are more interested in EDLP (everyday low pricing).

Some goals that Meijer has are the following:
-Meijer tries to create value, and focuses attention on their signage in their stores.
-They also want to consistently improve customer service at their stores. They say that training their employees correctly is key to making this happen.
-Meijer also feels like they need to become a destination for shoppers. In fact, they want each department to be a destination for that particular specialty.
-They also want to expand into new markets. They are currently looking at the Chicago area, and they feel that they could expand from 35 to 300 stores in that area. Meijer wants to experience a 6% growth rate each year, which would amount to 400 stores.

Some challenges that Meijer is experiencing are the following:
-Updating their older stores.
-They don’t want to have a “cookie cutter” feel to their stores, however they want the stores to be similar so that customers can easily find the items that they want.