Walmart and the Hispnic Market? That was my research...

During my first year of my MBA program I was part of a field study team taking part in a assignment from Sam’s Club to look into the Hispanic Market. Sam’s Club was planning on and looking into creating a Hispanic Sam’s club stores to cater to this growing market here in the US. It was a great project and my team was really happy to take part in it. Over the next 4 months we did extensive research that included tracking trends of the Hispanic Population and markets as well as personal interviews with many Hispanic store owners.

With all this information collected we presented our findings in Bentonville, AK to the Corporate Members of Sam’s Club along with a few Corporate Members of Wal-Mart. They loved the presentation but since then we had not really seen Sam’s Club making any moves on all the research we did, until now:

Walmart opens Hispanic market

Am I saying that this was all the work of my team? No, I am not, but what I am saying is that they had to have used some of the research we had done for Sam’s Club. It was a very extensive report with lots of research on the Hispanic Population as well as on how smaller Hispanic Stores operated and how they would do so on a bigger scale. Maybe they did not use our exact research in this endeavor, but I am sure they used it to steer them in the right direction to get the information they need.

What is funny is that the two areas we recommended, Houston and Los Angeles (due to our research and supply of Hispanic products), were almost the exact areas they put stores in (Houston and Phoenix, I can understand Phoenix instead of LA because of the difficulty Wal-Mart has had going into California and Phoenix is really close to LA).

Once again I am not saying that this came directly from our research and we are somehow the masterminds behind this project and we deserve money. I am almost positive though that some of the research we did directly helped in this initiative. I just thought it was pretty cool to see some of the research work I did back in school actually have an effect on the company. Many times I have done field studies in College only for the company to ignore what we suggested and just move on. It is nice to see some of my hard studies actually get used in the real world.