Wal-Mart aims for even lower prices

Wal-Mart CEO says the retail giant is ‘re-energizing’ its discount programs to offset gas prices, boost traffic.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Wal-Mart is preparing to go deeper with discounts in a bid to boost customer traffic and offset lost sales as higher gas prices force its core low-income shoppers to cut back, Wal-Mart CEO Eduardo Castro-Wright told an industry gathering Thursday.

“We’ve reenergized our rollback program to convince consumers that the smart thing is to go to Wal-Mart and save more,” Castro-Wright announced during his presentation to analysts at the Goldman Sachs retail conference in New York.

Castro-Wright said the company was gearing up to develop media and in-store advertising efforts to communicate this latest initiative to its consumers.

He added that the move was in response to Wal-Mart’s own market research, which evaluated its customers’ exposure to gas prices and asked what “we could do to help make it worthwhile for shoppers to make the additional two to three mile trip to our stores.”

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