WMT has put the lid on monthly sales reporting as of today. Initial read could be negative, but in reality it's probably for the best. With WMT pulling the plug, what's the incentive for everyone that competes with Wal*Mart to give out numbers? Yeah, there will be many specialty apparel retailers that will always need to report numbers in order to mitigate massive volatility at the end of the quarter and to facilitate conversations with investors intra-quarter by placating disclosure rules. But for the most part, the vaunted 'same store sales day' just fell a couple notches on the market's event calendar.
From WMT's Press Release
"At the start of this fiscal year, Wal-Mart revised its approach to providing guidance for sales. We went from providing guidance for monthly sales to forecasting a guidance range for our U.S. businesses for the full 13-week period," said Tom Schoewe, executive vice president and chief financial officer for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. "Moving forward, we will no longer report monthly sales. We will provide comparable store sales results on a 13-week basis, along with guidance for the upcoming 13-week period. And, we will release this information during our scheduled quarterly earnings calls.
