Walmart stores scale down for urban markets

Walmart, in its effort to open stores in big cities, is offering to make a few of its future stores as small as 8,000 sq. ft. A try-out of radically smaller stores is being proposed as part of the attempt by the Bentonville, Arkansas, chain to move into cities like Chicago, where the company has encountered strong citizen and labor union opposition.

The strategy would be to “get our stores as close to our customers as possible, so in urban markets, we’ll be doing that with multiple formats,” Hank Mullany, who runs Walmart stores in the Midwest, Northeast, and mid-Atlantic regions, told The New York Times in June. The company argues that Walmart would generate new jobs in cities. However, competing stores — some of them small-format operations in walkable neighborhood business districts — might be put out of business by Walmart. Consequently, it’s not clear that there would be an growth in overall urban employment.