Tracking the shrinking Walmart
“Walmart Express” units of just 15,000 square feet are on the way — responding to Americans’ growing reluctance to drive long distances.
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
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