Wal-Mart: A Snap Inspection

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The Westbury store is located in an area with a median household income of $82,000, but it wasn't as chic as the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream. Faux wooden floors are used sparingly, seen only in a few sections such as handbags and women's apparel, and the aisles are relatively narrow. Pao felt like it was a half-hearted attempt at looking nice, since the rest of the store still had the unsightly gray linoleum floors.

The store in Uniondale was the last we visited. The town is about 28 miles east of Manhattan with a median annual income of $68,000. It was the most neglected of the three stores, with minimal upgrades. Rows and rows of clothing hung on T-bars with little attempt to make the products appealing. The displays here reminded Pao of Woolworth's, the five-and-dime store that went out of business in the 1990s. "Customers need visual cues to focus on—they need the little boutique-like effect that Target creates by focusing on different items in various parts of the store," says Pao. "The clothes on T-bars as far as the eye can see gives it the feeling of a big mess, even though it's neat enough."

Fashion Disaster

When it came to fashion, Pao found Wal-Mart lagging. It's a subject close to Pao, who in the past has consulted with retailers like Ann Taylor (ANN). Even at the store where the displays were nice, Pao felt that Wal-Mart's more upscale George and Metro 7 line lacked excitement. She says these so-called affordable trendy lines are mostly upscale basics, only modestly different from the vast swaths of jeans, T-shirts, tank tops, and other basic clothing lines displayed in the many aisles at Wal-Mart. "It's certainly not trendy, but a collection of upscale basics that their core customers could gravitate to," says Pao.

Yet another disappointment was in store for us. The fitting rooms were locked, and no one was around to open them, the third time in as many stores that we had encountered such a problem. Similar to the situation with electronics, customers looking for clothing largely find themselves on their own. They can furtively try on T-shirts or sweaters between racks of clothing, or they just have to hope that the clothes they're interested in will fit.

Pao tries several doors in the unmanned fitting room area. Finally, one opens. Still, she is unimpressed. "It was the size of a small closet and didn't have any mirrors, so you have to walk out to see how you look," she says. Pao says that nice fitting rooms are one of the basic tenets of good customer service. Requiring customers to track down a sales clerk or wait to try on outfits is off-putting to many shoppers.

Pao's distinct impression was that the floor salespeople did not want to help on any front. At all three stores, Pao asked for an organic beauty line called Noah's Naturals, whose products she had heard were available at Wal-Mart. In the Uniondale store, not far from the cashier who would later say Wal-Mart didn't care about her, Pao approached one female employee who was stocking shelves to make her inquiry. Without pausing in her work, the worker said she had never heard of the line. She then turned back to the shelves to stock more beauty creams, without offering to locate the product at another store or find out if it would be coming in later.

Successful retailing is "10% a great idea and 90% execution," says Pao. However, in the case of Wal-Mart, especially when it comes to customer service, she says it looks like "90% was spent on strategy and thinking, and 10% on execution."

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Gogoi is a contributing writer for BusinessWeek.com.