Now Wal-Mart is shaking up the cozy market research industry by refusing to play ball with competitors. Independent market research is used in industries ranging from automotive to travel. Research firms generally collect sales data from competing companies by promising to return aggregated data for the entire industry. While the crunched numbers don't necessarily break out each company's performance, they allow each party to see how its performance compares with the whole sector. The data is gathered in two ways.
Researchers conduct weekly surveys on the shopping habits of set panels of thousands of households.
They also receive sales data directly from cashiers. It's possible that Wal-Mart's move is a ploy to squeeze more money out of the research firms. Industry analysts estimate that each company pays Wal-Mart several million dollars annually, and they speculate the retailer may just want more. That's similar to what happened with Safeway in the United Kingdom in 1996. For six months the supermarket chain stopped providing data to AC Nielsen until the two companies reached new terms.