Wal-Mart?s Miracles Appear to Never Cease

Amid, or maybe because of, all the bad economic news comes yet another good quarterly earnings report from our friends in Bentonville, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Total sales were up 15.5 percent compared with the good ol’ days in the third quarter of 2000, and same-store sales — the best indicator — were up 6.7 percent. There are a lot of retailers that would gladly settle for breaking even with last year.

What Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott called a “difficult economy” has historically been “a good environment for Wal-Mart.” Higher-end retailers, including Dillard’s Inc., are being eaten alive while nervous consumers conserve dollars with those everyday low prices.

But we trust Wal-Mart doesn’t really hope for a recession — sales were up, but the profit margin was down by 33 basis points. The kind of things Wal-Mart shoppers buy when their confidence is down are low-margin consumables, not high-margin durables.

It’s in times like these that the love-hate relationship that Arkansas, and all of America, has with Wal-Mart shifts a bit more toward love.