Wal-Mart to offer luxury goods, sushi bars in their stores

You still won’t get yuppies in there.

We go to Costco. We go to SuperTarget.

We don’t want to rub elbows with Joe Lumpen when he’s picking up his 12-pack of Natty Light. We have superiority complexes, and we want to shop amongst our own.

You might have been around first, and you might have scraped a ton of money from the bottom. But Costco took your Sam’s Club concept and built a mass-merchandiser specifically aiming at people who might want to pick up a plasma TV or Fendi bag as an impulse item when they’re grabbing a 40-lb bag of IAMS for their labradors. SuperTarget took your Wal-Mart grocery concept and built a megastore specifically aiming at people who might want to load up on Thai noodles, seafood and California red wines when they’re grabbing shampoo and the latest Isaac Mizrahi or Luella mass-designed tank top.

WMT, you’ve got the lumpen. Perhaps you can squeeze a few more dollars out of them by offering them cheap gasoline. But Costco’s got you beat there, too. Yuppies will put a lot more gasoline in the Ford Expedition than the Lumpen family will put in their Chevy Cavalier.

~Alyx

PS: Do stock a few plasma TV’s, though. If one of the Lumpens is a GM employee and accepts a buyout of his contract… he may pick one up on impulse. You never know. But this is a long term strat doomed to fail.

(Disclosure: Alyx is a former WMT shareholder and as best she can recall sold all of that crap. She probably bought Starbucks with the proceeds. Either the stock or the latte, and possibly both.)