The local Walmart Neighborhood Market just went through a big-time refresh. It took a few months and the store actually looks quite different. The process caused complete chaos with about 20 parking spaces taken up by containers and equipment.
Outside: New signage with the name of the city before Neighborhood Market. Also, some painting on the front and sides.
Inside, (from front to back) they had a set up with a short aisle, a cross aisle, another short aisle, then a cross aisle at the back of the store. This has been changed to long aisles with no cross aisle across most of the store, except at the front and back.
The area where the order pickers begin their tasks and store their carts has been moved from the back of the store (blocking a good deal of the pet food section) to an area that cannot be seen at the front. Tremendous improvement there.
New shelving was installed that is really high, making the place dark.
New self check out set up that, when the store is busy, blocks the front aisle.
Unfortunately, with all of these changes, there are still pallets of stuff blocking the aisles (particularly the back aisle) a lot of the time.
So, overall functionality has improved somewhat would be my assessment.
jipper wrote: ↑September 15th, 2023, 6:49 am
The local Walmart Neighborhood Market just went through a big-time refresh. It took a few months and the store actually looks quite different. The process caused complete chaos with about 20 parking spaces taken up by containers and equipment.
Outside: New signage with the name of the city before Neighborhood Market. Also, some painting on the front and sides.
Inside, (from front to back) they had a set up with a short aisle, a cross aisle, another short aisle, then a cross aisle at the back of the store. This has been changed to long aisles with no cross aisle across most of the store, except at the front and back.
The area where the order pickers begin their tasks and store their carts has been moved from the back of the store (blocking a good deal of the pet food section) to an area that cannot be seen at the front. Tremendous improvement there.
New shelving was installed that is really high, making the place dark.
New self check out set up that, when the store is busy, blocks the front aisle.
Unfortunately, with all of these changes, there are still pallets of stuff blocking the aisles (particularly the back aisle) a lot of the time.
So, overall functionality has improved somewhat would be my assessment.
Walmart doesn't believe in running stores with large stock rooms. They want as little in the back as possible to maximize sales. That means there usually isn't even enough room in the back to fit the entire unloaded truck; they unload and sort by department onto pallets then push them to the floor. If the truck doesn't get done due to poor performance or lack of staffing then the pallets of freight wind up staying out on the floor until finished. I have seen some Walmart neighborhood markets where they deliberately install pallet racking over multiple grocery aisles so they can unload a truck around 5am or later and just use a forklift to put all the freight up above the aisles without stocking it. Then they only have to stock refrigerated goods immediately, and the rest of the freight waits for the overnight crew. As soon as the store closes they bring down those pallets of freight and stock them. This is a clever workaround that enables them to basically not have a back room at all and maximize the sales floor square footage thus maximizing their sales. But if anything goes wrong then there's pallets blocking aisles everywhere.
I've seen several of these neighborhood market refreshes over the last couple years. It seems Walmart culled the many unproductive locations and only held onto the ones that turn large profits. So they seem to have increased their commitment to the small store format even though to the best of my knowledge they have not opened any new neighborhood markets for many years.
