How Walmart Can Save America

Its no surprise that the days of big-box retailers are dwindling. Revenues are tapering off, competition from online is dropping profit margins and reducing store traffic. Mail order and specialty pharmacy are poaching drug pick-ups and the next generation of goods distribution includes everything from automated delivery trucks to helicopters to stocking your workplace with consumer goods.

It won’t be long until consumers will show up to work on Monday and pick up a weekly order of their essential household and non-perishables items. Show me a single parent with a couple of children at home or a trendy young millennial looking to maximize efficiency that would refuse that?

So what are the big box retailers doing? For starters, infusing high margin items in their stores like pharmacy, banking, and medical care. Walmart, Target, Walgreens and more are getting into the primary care business. Yes, its tough to make a profit when you staff a $300,000 primary care physician in a store where the average employee makes around an one eighth of that. However, it allows you to bill the insurance plans at a physician rate which is much higher that an nurse practitioner counterpart.

So, with diminishing draws to bring customers into the store, how do retailers with enough floor space for a few 747's start raising profit per square inch? Easy answer – downsize, which will come. However, market leaders will always be on the cutting edge, getting nicked by the very razor edge on which they stand.

So what will that look like?

Well, for starters, think about the already existing foot traffic for the various stores. Let’s think about what services people will honestly value and willingly spend their time on. Because, as we know from social media, we can now turn time and data into money. Direct, transactional, fee-for-service, you-give-me-this-in-exchange-for-that are going to be combined with bundled payments. Car insurance expense linked to your real-time actual driving habits, reduced medical insurance co-pays for disease management, and rebates for purchasing healthy food, all signals of the future of bundled services.

Bundled services will look like combining meaningful services in one space, much like a mall, but a mall that isn’t just for teens to meander about and patrons to pick up the latest and greatest gadget or gown. So Walmart already is putting primary care clinics in the stores. Talk to a primary care physician though and ask them what services are most needed for vulnerable populations. The answer is likely social services, disease management, smoking cessation, mental health counseling, career services. This is where the real medical dollars are found. Want to stop our nation from bankrupting itself from Medicare and Medicaid? Turn Walmart into the hallmark for social services.

Can you image how different Walmart would be if they offered those support services? Then it might not feel like walking into a well-light future wasteland that exemplifies American consumerism perpetuating unhealthy ideology. Delivery valuable social, economic, medical, and behavioral support services in conjunction with routine shopping excursions could turn Walmart into the organization that helped turn America towards a brighter future.