Wal-Mart at it again:
Wal-Mart has been disrupting the retail landscape for decades. Recently, Ultimate Electronics, a high end consumer electronics retailer, announced another disappointing quarter of losses. Wal-Mart doesn't sell high end consumer electronics, so what do they have to do with with Ultimate's bad quarter?

Wal-Mart has made a huge push into low end consumer electronics over the past few years. Last year Walmart announced they would start selling Sony products in their stores, and thus started Walmart's march upstream. The smart execs at Best Buy have been watching Walmart for some time and knew that this moment was coming, so they quickly jumped into super expensive, high end products like Plasma and LCD HDTVs (The products Ultimate sells). Moving upstream has put companies like Ultimate and Tweeter in serious trouble. Utilizing the internet, consumer are educating themselves about high end products before hitting the stores, thus making Tweeter and Ultimate's specialized sales force almost irrelevant. So how does the story end? I am not certain, but I don't think Walmart will become less of a factor, and Best Buy is loving the margins on the high end, maybe Ultimate and Tweeter need to get into the super high end products for the ultra rich.