Walmart 2023 Closings

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Re: Walmart 2023 Closings

Post by storewanderer »

retailfanmitchell019 wrote: March 21st, 2023, 2:56 pm
arizonaguy wrote: March 21st, 2023, 1:48 pm They seem to have announced a new wave of closings today.

Brooklyn Center, MN (1200 Shingle Creek Crossing)

This is an 11 year old store located on the site of a former mall (Brookdale Mall) and apparently the area is a high crime area. The Target in the area closed in 2019.

South Bend, IN (3701 Portage Rd)

This looks like a 1990s build supercenter that was recently renovated. There's a Meijer across the street. It doesn't really seem to be a shrink / theft / crime related issue. Google reviews seem to state that this store has been severely understaffed for a while. Judging by google maps this area just doesn't seem to be a high volume retail corridor and the Meijer probably performs better than the Walmart does.

The Brighton. MI store that closed in 2018 and the Plainfield, IL store (closed earlier this year) were also across the street from Meijer.


Cahokia Heights IL (1511 Camp Jackson Road)

This is a Division 1 store in a very economically depressed area. I'm sure theft / crime / shrink played a factor here.
Brooklyn Center is definitely one of the rougher areas around MSP. The Walmart that's closing competes with a Cub Foods. Up the street from the Cub, before you get to I-94 is Sun Foods, an ethnic market with Asian, Middle Eastern, and African foods. That store is a former Rainbow, I think it closed when Fleming sold Rainbow to Roundy's.

South Bend looks to be a 2001 model Supercenter. I think lack of access is what did this store in (there are no exits off I-80/90 going directly to the store).

Brighton closed in 2016 during the big Walmart purge.
South Bend closure is pretty interesting. It appears the next closest Wal Marts are going to be 15 minutes away. This feels like a hole. Like a sub-market exit of sorts. Meijer clearly creamed them good. Access keep in mind that part of the Interstate is a toll road so most locals likely try to avoid it and use surface streets.

Brooklyn Center is absolutely a theft related closure. No question.

Carhokia Heights looks pretty old. Maybe it simply reached its "end of life" in Wal Mart terms. Store #747- so a pretty low number probably dating to the 80's. No self checkout. I see there is a Schnucks there near the Wal Mart- old Kroger greenhouse. May even still have the Kroger interior. Definitely has some Kroger department signs on the exterior. The surrounding neighborhood looks pretty desolate like it has been losing population for decades.
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Re: Walmart 2023 Closings

Post by mbz321 »

BillyGr wrote: March 12th, 2023, 4:28 pm
Super S wrote: March 12th, 2023, 11:17 am Some of these things could be addressed in a Sam's Club format, which restricts entry to begin with.
Do they actually do that? I may have been in one once or twice, but not recently. BJ's that we have here did that when they first started, but now only check people leaving, no one checks for a card upon entry.
I let my Sam's membership lapse, but the last few times I used it, there was nobody at all at the entrance. Given there are no pictures on any Sam's memberships, having someone check seems kind of pointless anyway as you can easily card share. My few local BJ's stores don't check at entry either, although I've heard ones in rougher areas do.
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Re: Walmart 2023 Closings

Post by babs »

The Walmart in Downtown Honolulu that used to be a Macy's is closing as well. I gotta think theft, high operating costs and fewer people working in the office in downtown Honolulu did it in.
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Re: Walmart 2023 Closings

Post by storewanderer »

babs wrote: March 22nd, 2023, 2:02 pm The Walmart in Downtown Honolulu that used to be a Macy's is closing as well. I gotta think theft, high operating costs and fewer people working in the office in downtown Honolulu did it in.
Another irregular format store closing.

Probably had an odd sales mix with that location.
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Re: Walmart 2023 Closings

Post by babs »

storewanderer wrote: March 23rd, 2023, 12:06 am
babs wrote: March 22nd, 2023, 2:02 pm The Walmart in Downtown Honolulu that used to be a Macy's is closing as well. I gotta think theft, high operating costs and fewer people working in the office in downtown Honolulu did it in.
Another irregular format store closing.

Probably had an odd sales mix with that location.
There's not a lot of residential in downtown Honolulu and with the paid parking, they probably got mostly walk-in traffic. I can't imagine they sold a ton of groceries outside of being an overgrown convenience store. My assumption is that the nearby stacked Walmart/Sam's combo over by the Ala Mona mall is getting the bulk of the area business. Free parking and being closer to the center of the residential units and tourist areas makes a big difference.

I believe they own the building so it will be interesting to see what happens to it. Clearly they will sell it. I highly doubt it will be a department store in the future. Retail at the street level and offices above is probably what's in store but I don't see any demand for office space in the downtown Honolulu in the near future.

Seems like Walmart is using the first part of this year to cleanse themselves of questionable locations. I don't know if they are done yet but probably a smart thing to do by pulling the Band-Aid off locations that don't make much sense.

And another location is closing...Everett, WA:
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/walmart- ... -april-21/
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Re: Walmart 2023 Closings

Post by buckguy »

I think there will be more closings and they will dribble out as they have--a few here, a few there, quietly with a few weeks between announcements. They don't want people paying too much attention or making a big deal out of their closing what really has been a small percentage of their stores, so far. They never had their heart in smaller stores and they seem to have more difficulty in urban areas than literally all the other big box chains, so those will be among the first to go.

They've already signaled that they want to be more serious about online retail and that probably means closing more stores. Also, not long ago they offloaded some foreign operations that were probably underperforming--they had made little progress in Japan which was meant to be a pan-Asian launching ground and apparently considered selling out over 10 years ago, while ASDA in the UK has lost market share and faces pressure from Aldi and Lidl which have been gaining share.
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Re: Walmart 2023 Closings

Post by Brian Lutz »

The "20 years" in the news article suggests that it's a non-renewal of a lease, but It doesn't surprise me that the Highway 99 store in Everett would be underperforming. There's another Walmart only a couple miles away on Everett Mall Way (in pretty much an ideal location to get traffic off southbound I-5) that is rather small for a Supercenter but I'm guessing just by its location it does a lot more volume than that Highway 99 store does. In six years of living in that area, I think I only ever went to the Highway 99 store once, but would frequently visit the Everett Mall Way store. It's also in a rough neighborhood, about a block from one of those Starbucks stores that recently got closed for "security issues".
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Re: Walmart 2023 Closings

Post by arizonaguy »

buckguy wrote: March 23rd, 2023, 1:58 pm I think there will be more closings and they will dribble out as they have--a few here, a few there, quietly with a few weeks between announcements. They don't want people paying too much attention or making a big deal out of their closing what really has been a small percentage of their stores, so far. They never had their heart in smaller stores and they seem to have more difficulty in urban areas than literally all the other big box chains, so those will be among the first to go.

They've already signaled that they want to be more serious about online retail and that probably means closing more stores. Also, not long ago they offloaded some foreign operations that were probably underperforming--they had made little progress in Japan which was meant to be a pan-Asian launching ground and apparently considered selling out over 10 years ago, while ASDA in the UK has lost market share and faces pressure from Aldi and Lidl which have been gaining share.
It seems like there are 3 types of closings:

1.) A closing where Walmart has overbuilt an area and there are multiple nearby stores. I'd argue that many of the Neighborhood Market closings as well as closings up until this point fall into this category. In the mid-late 2000s and early 2010s Walmart wasn't very selective about store locations and seemed to put a store anywhere they could fit one. In these latest closings I'd argue Plainfield, IL and South Bend, IN fall into this category. It also doesn't help that these stores were across the street from Meijer who has always taken a much more scientific / measured approach to store locations.

2.) A division 1 store where there is really no rationale to expand it to a supercenter and the store's clientele has "matured" for lack of a better term into something that Walmart can't generate profits / volumes it used to be able to anymore.

3.) A store where Walmart is a 2nd or 3rd tenant, generally in an urban area, where shrink / crime / homelessness is a problem and/or where there are a lot of extra local regulations on retail.

What I haven't seen is a lot of store openings. Walmart did say that it planned to open 30 new Sam's units soon and I'd imagine after a few more purges in a few years they may selectively open a small number of new Walmart stores although nowhere near as many new stores as stores it is closing.

It appears that Walmart is feeling pressure in all aspects of it's business. In addition to these scattered store closings they're also laying off hundreds of workers at some e-commerce fulfillment centers.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail ... 023-03-23/
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Re: Walmart 2023 Closings

Post by buckguy »

arizonaguy wrote: March 23rd, 2023, 6:39 pm

It appears that Walmart is feeling pressure in all aspects of it's business. In addition to these scattered store closings they're also laying off hundreds of workers at some e-commerce fulfillment centers.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail ... 023-03-23/
Interesting article. Reuters lets them off easy--Amazon's layoffs have a lot to do with stores that no one wanted although they also have cut back in fulfillment centers and Lidl seems to be restarting its expansion after a pause. Even with automation, if WM is laying off in fulfillment centers, it may be a sign that online sales are not growing at the pace they had hoped.

If you take away food, Walmart mostly has been stagnating since the early 2000s. They had a brief bump in the great recession and they have benefited from raising their grocery prices, but they haven't been able to grow their base of customers and didn't benefit very much from the decline of KMart.
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Re: Walmart 2023 Closings

Post by retailfanmitchell019 »

buckguy wrote: March 23rd, 2023, 1:58 pm I think there will be more closings and they will dribble out as they have--a few here, a few there, quietly with a few weeks between announcements. They don't want people paying too much attention or making a big deal out of their closing what really has been a small percentage of their stores, so far. They never had their heart in smaller stores and they seem to have more difficulty in urban areas than literally all the other big box chains, so those will be among the first to go.

They've already signaled that they want to be more serious about online retail and that probably means closing more stores. Also, not long ago they offloaded some foreign operations that were probably underperforming--they had made little progress in Japan which was meant to be a pan-Asian launching ground and apparently considered selling out over 10 years ago, while ASDA in the UK has lost market share and faces pressure from Aldi and Lidl which have been gaining share.
Walmart already dumped off Asda two years ago.
https://www.standard.co.uk/business/lei ... 20013.html

Focusing on online retail is a pander to Wall Street, and a pander to affluent people who rarely shop at Walmart. It might somewhat alienate Walmart's working-class, exurban, church-going, pickup truck driving customer base.
arizonaguy wrote: March 23rd, 2023, 6:39 pm
It seems like there are 3 types of closings:

1.) A closing where Walmart has overbuilt an area and there are multiple nearby stores. I'd argue that many of the Neighborhood Market closings as well as closings up until this point fall into this category. In the mid-late 2000s and early 2010s Walmart wasn't very selective about store locations and seemed to put a store anywhere they could fit one. In these latest closings I'd argue Plainfield, IL and South Bend, IN fall into this category. It also doesn't help that these stores were across the street from Meijer who has always taken a much more scientific / measured approach to store locations.

2.) A division 1 store where there is really no rationale to expand it to a supercenter and the store's clientele has "matured" for lack of a better term into something that Walmart can't generate profits / volumes it used to be able to anymore.

What I haven't seen is a lot of store openings. Walmart did say that it planned to open 30 new Sam's units soon and I'd imagine after a few more purges in a few years they may selectively open a small number of new Walmart stores although nowhere near as many new stores as stores it is closing.

It appears that Walmart is feeling pressure in all aspects of it's business. In addition to these scattered store closings they're also laying off hundreds of workers at some e-commerce fulfillment centers.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail ... 023-03-23/
I found this Division 1 store in Rohnert Park, CA. Might be the last store to have the old WAL-MART signage. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Walma ... %2F03nzj6j
Both Walmarts in Sonoma County are Div 1.
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