Walmart Casts Wider Its Health and Beauty Web

Walmart's just-announced expansion of health and beauty products online is two moves in one as it reinforces ongoing initiatives to make its personal care business more competitive even as it bolsters health maintenance initiatives.

Walmart plans to include "thousands" of top-selling items from national brands like Neutrogena, Pampers, L'Oreal, Colgate, Pantene and Gillette in its health and beauty care service expansion, promising consumers low prices on their favorite products. And when Walmart promises low prices, it usually means lowest, at least on average, which is another way of telling folks that they don't have to bother shopping around to feel like they're being good consumers, they just have to shop Walmart.

In announcing the new effort, Kelly Thompson, Walmart.com's chief merchant, said the company was expanding off in-store programs that had established a solid reputation for savings on personal care items by providing broader access to bargains. "By offering savings on our customers' favorite health and beauty items online and in our stores, we can better help our customers shop the way they want," Thompson said.

Terms of the deal, and the way it provides savings, encourage consumers to buy large. Shipping under the initiatives is 97 cents per item. So Walmart saves those consumers who find the deal attractive one -- or, if they're purchasing really big sizes, more -- trips to the drug store.

Certainly, Walmarket doesn't mind if consumers skip a trip to Walgreen or CVS or Rite Aid. After all, it has been systematically introducing new health and personal care initiatives with in-store efforts bolstering its credibility and online introducing greater convenience.

In September, for example, Walmart announced an expansion of its prescription mail delivery program nationwide, providing broader access to its low-cost pharmacy drug programs

Then, earlier this week, Walmart announced that it would address a national shortage of Tamiflu oral suspension medication by converting capsules to liquid form in 4,000 Walmart and Sam's Club pharmacies. The liquid form is typically provided for children, the elderly and those whose physical condition precludes them from swallowing the capsules.

Major drug chains are certainly active and, in many measures, more advanced in their health services operations than Walmart. Yet, the mass-market sales leader is taking a typical approach, focusing on major opportunities where it can use its purchasing power, efficiencies of distribution and broad accessibility to dominate volume businesses, leaving the more specialized to others. In doing so, it has a good shot at establishing a dominant position, becoming the major provider of common health and personal care needs just the way it has of t-shirts and white bread.