Citigroup (NYSE:C) analyst Deborah Weinswig upgraded Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) from hold to buy on Sunday, also increasing her price target on the company from $54 a share to $65 a share.

There were several reasons cited by Weinswig for the upgrade. The first was the food sector, which Weinswig claims the company is going to fight even harder to win in the price-conscious public continuing to look for savings and deals.

Another key factor was in what are identified as rollbacks, which is another way of saying products which will have permanent price cuts as part of doing business at Wal-Mart.

With most companies with would generate a lot of concern because of the resultant pressure on profits from cutting prices so much. But because Wal-Mart is better at lean operations than any other retailer in the world, they can make these types of cuts, and probably already have in place margins which won’t be hurt by the discount prices.

Finally, the way Wal-Mart has made their stores much more open and clear is a major factor for its continuing push to attract a higher-income clientele.

If you’ve been there lately you can see how it looks a lot different in the past. Doing some of my usual research, I thought when looking them over recently is was in preparation for the spring season, but evidently this might be a permanent change. We’ll see though, as Wal-Mart has filling up every corner of the store in their genes, so it’ll be interesting to see if this continues going forward.

One thing I’m still unimpressed with is their obsession with changing their clothing line to also attract people with higher incomes. So far that effort has been a disaster, and could backfire for their base customer.

Even with their new team built to work on that area, it’s hard for me to see them being able to cater to their base customer and higher-end customers in the clothing market at the same time. They may be successful at it, but it’ll be hard to do.

Probably more than any other discount retail competitor, the clothing line effort more than likely is aimed at Target (NYSE:TGT), which draws that exact type of customer to their stores very successfully.

But in these times, the thing Wal-Mart has going for it is even people with more money are looking for the best deals, and if Wal-Mart can do a balancing act here without alienating their existing clientele, they could open up another entire market within their existing stores, with a lot of upside potential.