Tracking the shrinking Walmart

For years, new urbanists have tried to tame the elephant — the 150,000 square foot Walmart supercenter and its vast parking lot. Usually these efforts have ended in frustration. Will urbanists be any happier with the mouse?

The mouse, in this case, is the 15,000 square foot Walmart Express — a radically downsized outlet that the company has begun introducing in rural Arkansas, rural North Carolina, and Chicago. At one-tenth the size of a supercenter, a Walmart Express could fit into a pedestrian-scale business district. How often it will do so remains to be seen.

The first Walmart Express opened in June in Gentry, Arkansas, a community of a little over 2,000 people, about a 35-minute drive from Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville. A “long, narrow concrete box” was the Associated Press’s description of the store. The Express format is designed to carry 11,000 to 13,000 items — a fraction of the 100,000-plus items offered in a supercenter.
In rural locations where nearly everyone arrives by car, the initial Walmart Express units are not pedestrian-oriented. The Gentry store has 45 parking spaces — one space for every 333 square feet of store interior.

Chicago, on the other hand, possesses many walkable neighborhoods and an extensive bus and rail network, so it’s possible that Walmart Express could fit pedestrian-scale settings. Unfortunately, Chicago’s initial Walmart Express is not situated on one of the city’s traditional shopping streets. It’s along a broad arterial, 83rd Street, just west of the Dan Ryan Expressway in the Chatham neighborhood on the city’s South Side. There, it’s part of a 50-acre development anchored by a Lowe’s Home Improvement store. The Walmart Express’s parking covers more land than the building does.

The city government is well aware of Walmart’s desire to tap the Chicago market, but is focusing on matters other than walkability and urban design. Mayor Rahm Emanuel said last March that his big concern — especially in areas that lack full-scale grocery stores — is to improve the nutrition available to residents. “You can’t have a major city” where 600,000 people “do not have access to fresh fruits and vegetables,” Emanuel was quoted by Supermarket News as saying.

At least one of Chicago’s first Walmart Express stores, however, will fit into a walkable shopping district. In June the Chicago Tribune reported that the company will open an Express in what has been a vacant art supply store on West Chicago Avenue, practically beneath the tracks of the “El.” It appears to be well-suited to walk-in customers.

Across the country, Walmart Express stores will sell fresh foods — fruit, vegetables, and meats, along with eggs, butter, and other products — and will have a pharmacy, a check-cashing counter, and a variety of other merchandise. Some will sell gasoline as well.

A changing way of life?

Walmart has seen its same-store sales decline for nine consecutive quarters. The Express format is part of the company’s strategy for reversing the decline, in part by attracting people of modest means, who have been doing more of their shopping at dollar stores.

In June, Tom Mars, a top Walmart executive, told Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council that the company’s smaller-format stores are performing on par with its supercenters, “which makes it that much more attractive to grow [the smaller] format at a faster rate.”

The Financial Times, in an in-depth report June 29, identified trends that are running against conventional supercenters: “One is that cash-strapped consumers are purchasing goods in smaller quantities. Another is that with petrol prices more than double what they were 10 years ago, people are reluctant to drive to a big-box store.” The average round trip to a dollar store is said by Credit Suisse analyst Michael Exstein to be 6 miles, versus 30 miles for a typical Walmart trip.

Those trends could encourage smaller stores, although Financial Times suggested the main beneficiaries would be chains such as CVS Caremark, Walgreens, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar — not locally based, independent retailers.

Financial Times suggested that Walmart helped sow its own difficulties. The chain insisted for years on getting the lowest possible prices from its suppliers — an aggressive stance that impelled many US companies to move production overseas, ultimately reducing the income of many American consumers. “Critics blame Walmart ... for creating a low-wage economy where many families live on the margins,” the British paper noted. “When the crisis pushed those families over the edge, Walmart’s sales suffered.”

John Marshall of the United Food and Commercial Workers said of Walmart: “They are victims of the world they created.”

Whether smaller formats — Walmart also introduced Neighborhood Market (or Walmart Market) stores containing about 42,000 square feet — and entry into large cities will enable Walmart to reverse its US slump is unclear. If recent trends gather momentum, it’s possible that Americans in growing numbers will choose to live and shop in less car-dependent places.

If that happens, a 15,000 square foot store could get by with a lot less parking. Pedestrian-oriented retail might, at last, become commonplace again.