$4 drugs:

1) As John in Kansas has pointed out, it's only a small fraction of the generic drugs Walmart sells. From the Wall St Journal 22 Sept 2006:   "For now the price cuts will apply to fewer than 300 of the roughly 2,000 generic drugs sold in most pharmacies."

2) "The reductions are unlikely to be costly to Wal-Mart, which along with other retailers already buys many of these drugs at "pennies per pill or less".

3) On some drugs, even with this reduction, the Walmart price is still not below the competition. Example: Popular new blood pressure medicine atenolol: Walmart: $4 for 30 pills (down from $8.62). Costco website: $3.69 for 30 pills.

4) Said an analyst: "What (the move does) is provide access to the uninsured and( Walmart's) own home base."   As you know, many of their own employees are now on Medicaid--a controversial issue (my comment)

5) Said Walgreen's spokesman: "A lot of the medications are very old generics".

6) "Critics called the effort "marketing spin" and "pointed to to what they characterized as Wal-Mart's less-than-generous health-care policies in which employees bear a big share of the costs."

7) Analyst: "..because generic drugs carry a higher profit margin at retail than branded drugs, Wal-Mart can clip its profit on the drugs and use any increased store traffic to sell more profitable non-generic items. It was frankly just a matter of time before someone decided to chip away at the generic-drug distribution system".




Also from the Wall St Journal: Meanwhile, at the same time, Walmart is ending the layaway program. This program "helped customers to afford bigger purchases by allowing them to pay for them n installments over 60 days without inccurring hefty interest payments. The move "could be particularly significant for lower-income customers. About 9% of US consumers don't use a bank, according to one survey, and Wal-Mart gets a disproportionate share of those shoppers."

"In addition, a certain percentage of its customers either don't qualify for credit cards or chose not to use them. For them, layaway was a particularly popular option, especially at the Christmas and back-to-school seasons"

"It's a bad, bad decision" said Tanya Judy, an administrative assistant at a Dallas film-developing company and a mother of two, who recently bought her eight-year daughter's school uniforms at Wal-Mart on layaway. I am coming out of a downward spiral of credit-card debt and I want to keep it that way..."