RTA a la Ikea: vignettes and self-service - ready to assemble furniture at Wal-Mart - Merchandising: home goods & housewares - Brief Article

DSN Retailing Today, Jan 26, 2004

Wal-Mart's initiative to get RTA furniture off racks and onto the floor where consumers can open drawers and field test chairs demonstrates the challenges and opportunities it will confront as it makes merchandising changes in the home department.

Several years ago, Wal-Mart moved RTA off inline racks onto a central platform presentation that allowed it to show a variety of assembled products and how they could complement one another. Still, the consumer and the product weren't exactly in a kick-the-tires position. You might reach out and spin a chair, but you couldn't park yourself on it.

A year or so ago, the fixture left and the furniture was placed in testing proximity. Now, consumers can satisfy themselves that the furniture Wal-Mart offers can meet their needs, something that has become even more critical as the retailer has blown out its presentation of upholstered products.

Yet, the challenges are apparent, too. As consumers pull on drawers and bang cupboard doors, they disarticulate the pieces, which has the opposite effect intended in promoting quality. On the platform fixture, assembled furniture had most moving parts sealed shut, but doing that on the sales floor also would be counterproductive. The new merchandising would seem to demand more labor, a prospect that probably doesn't delight Wal-Mart executives.

And what about those fixtures? They couldn't have been cheap, and Wal-Mart certainly found ways to recycle them, but the retailer would have to face that challenge again and on a bigger scale if it significantly updated other home goods segments.