Wal-Mart to offer sex toys
Bentonville, Arkansas - Wal-Mart Corporation today announced that they are preparing to sell sex toys in select stores around the country. The mammoth retailer spent a full year on customer research and reached the conclusion that in select rural markets, where it’s stores are most popular, there is definitely a pent-up demand for sex toys among women.
 
Starting with a rural Iowa location, Wal-Mart plans a pilot operation for this new sales effort over the summer. The new store-within-the-store, referred to as the “Home Pleasure” department, will feature vibrators and dildoes at reduced prices. The store reportedly will offer the wildly popular Martha Stewart “Prison” line of vibrators in addition to its regular offerings.
According to Wal-Mart spokesman Edward Kennedy, “While we expect some risk in this venture, our research indicates that women in rural parts of the country have largely unfulfilled desires and needs for these items”. Kennedy additionally pointed to recent studies in urban markets where internet access is affordable and common. There a wide variety of sex toys are commonly purchased by married women..
In rural parts of the country where Wal-Mart stores
are sometimes the only retail business around, internet access can also be very
limited, so the selling of sex toys appears to be a natural extension of
Wal-Mart’s personal products offerings. Spokesman Kennedy told Red Tractor USA
that the female customers that they surveyed had privately indicated that they
“most desired sex toys in the summer time, when their husbands worked the farms
from dusk to dawn, seven days a week.”
Wal-Mart’s Kennedy also revealed the retailer’s marketing plans to locate the “Home Pleasure” departments in the rear of the store near the guns and ammo department. While the men are checking out the latest in Smith and Wessons, their wives can shop discreetly and with confidence for their own little helpers.
Wal-Mart sees an opportunity to demystify these types of items and even envisions these locations having private, women-only parties as a means to attract new and discerning customers into their stores. When asked if they expected any backlash from their conservative customers, a Wal-Mart executive who wished to remain anonymous, told Red Tractor USA that “We are already the volume leader in condoms and birth control pills in our pharmacies. So we feel that today’s Wal-Mart woman will readily welcome these additions.”
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