Walmart 2023 Closings

[retailfanmitchell019]

The situation is very similar around Minneapolis. The Wal Mart units are not particularly well located and do not seem particularly high volume.

It is also noticeable in OR/WA where they compete against Fred Meyer. But there are some Wal Mart vs. Fred Meyer match ups where both stores seem very busy.

But in California those are some of the busiest Wal Marts I've seen. Even a few busy Neighborhood Markets (only region I've ever seen busy Neighborhood Markets).

Much of the Minneapolis/St Paul metro is a dead zone for Walmart. The Twin Cities being Target's home turf is a factor. There are no Walmart stores in huge swaths of the metro- none in Carver County (pop 100,000), which is a fast growing, affluent suburb of Minneapolis. They tried to put a store in Chanhassen (town in Carver County) in 2011, but that plan was aborted.
https://www.swnewsmedia.com/chanhassen_ ... b3bb5.html
There are no Walmarts in the central portion of Hennepin County (Minnetonka/Plymouth/St. Louis Park/Golden Valley/Wayzata). There are only 3 Walmarts inside "the beltway" (494/694), one of them (Brooklyn Center) is about to close.

I can imagine Walmart is stronger in the eastern portions of the PNW.

Walmart is also weak in the NYC metro- they have lower share there than Acme.

[ClownLoach]

Is Walmart afraid to admit the reasons for their stores failing despite high volume? If they claim theft over and over they are admitting they can't control their own stores. They don't want to allocate payroll to staff the stores the way they should be let alone full staff loss prevention. The receipt checker at the door isn't going to stop a determined thief and certainly not a professional. By the way, when I was out shopping last weekend I noticed that all of the Walmart stores around me now have receipt checkers at the door. It used to just be a couple of kind of sketchy stores. I just walked by and the checker said nothing. Is there anything in general law that forces you to stop? You aren't paying for a membership like with Sam's or Costco where you agree in the terms to have your purchases checked.



This is another example of what happens when you actually have competition. Since Kmart has gone bust and Target doesn't seem to be into grocery beyond PFresh, Walmart can just carry along like they always have because no one is going to challenge them at their own game. Me thinks that if Meijer were a national player, Walmart would have to put up or shut up. If Walmart tried to compete with Meijer in their current state I suspect that Walmart would end up contracting back to is core rural and semi-rural markets, areas where Meijer isn't and the suburban areas that Meijer doesn't click but doesn't fail either. I suspect that would be a far cry from the store base that Walmart has now.

Walmart's high store volumes mean that comp percentage points are hard to attain, despite Wall Street's demands for them. They cannot afford to have negative comping stores even if they are profitable because of the impact low comps will play on their stock price.

This means that their stores are especially vulnerable to good competition like the Meijer described here. The Walmart might have a bottom line profit in the millions but the damage to the Walton family stock shares far outweighs those dollars so the store is closed immediately. You are correct that a good, competent national competitor would really hurt Walmart because of how they are evaluated and valued by investors.

This is precisely the reason why they closed all of those Sam's Clubs back in 2018. Costco is a good, competent national competitor and was hurting Sam's Club and Walmart as a whole.

Now Costco has made some missteps since then which has created an opening for Sam's.

In the 2023 closings there have been 2 closings directly related to Meijer.

South Bend, IN and Plainfield, IL

The Plainfield closing seems worse as it's a closing in an area that Walmart should be successful in. It's a clearly suburban area with a healthy retail corridor and I doubt shrink / theft is the reasoning there. There's a still open Kohl's, Menards, Target and Meijer nearby. This is the type of area that Walmart seems to do very well in in other markets. The store was also very recently renovated.

I can name at least three situations where a competitor opened (or revitalized) and Walmart gave up within less than a year. Costco opened a 2nd Tustin, CA store a mile from their other location and they gave up on their nearby Sam's Club within a year. (ironically it sat vacant several years then reopened as a Walmart). Costco opened a business center in Westminster, CA and Sam's closed their Stanton location a mile down the street, it had been fully remodeled to what was then their current prototype. And Walmart had a weird situation in Irvine, CA where they opened a store across the freeway from a busy Target. The Target went for almost two years with virtually no parking while a new parking structure was built for their use, and Walmart sales obviously went through the roof two years in a row. Target did take advantage of the lack of parking and completed a "Tier 1" full remodel while their business had slowed to a crawl. Then the new parking structure opened, Target got all of their business back and then some, and Walmart pulled the plug a year later (weeks after replacing all of the lighting in the store).

So three examples where a competition situation changed and they raised the white flag almost immediately. Costco had the most successful grand opening in the history of their US stores in Murrieta, CA last fall - a very fast growing area. I'm sure if there wasn't so much population growth the Murrieta Sam's Club would be closed for negative comps even though it is one of their top volume stores in the western US. Walmart just seems to have low tolerance for negative comps as well as shrink. They spend so little relative to other retailers on their infrastructure, fixtures etc. that they can afford to just walk away from the store and close down. I'm sure they have leases with easy exit clauses where they don't outright own their stores.

[storewanderer]

Wal Mart may not put much into infrastructure but when they built the buildings they built above average quality buildings during most of their major expansion period. If I look at the Washoe County Assessor site for Wal Mart, it shows most of their buildings are building quality C25 - Commercial Above Average.
https://www.washoecounty.gov/assessor/cama/
5065 Pyramid - Sparks - build 2005- C25 -owned
4855 Kietzke - Reno - build 1995 - C25 -owned
5260 West 7th - Reno - build 1995 - C25 -owned
155 Damonte Ranch- Reno- build 2001 - C25 -leased

250 Vista Knoll - Reno - build 2011 - this one is only C20-Commercial Average - owned
So it appears maybe with later stores they cheaped out.

Can't tell on 2425 Second Street - Reno since it is on Reno Sparks Indian Colony land

Also funny the Reno Sam's at 4835 Kietzke Lane built in 2002 is C10-Commercial Low building quality.

Most retail buildings around town are C20 - Commercial Average. Dillards- great looking store to me- but only a C20.

This includes the local Target Stores at 6845 Sierra Center in Reno and 1550 E. Lincoln in Sparks both owned by Target and both C20 quality.

[Romr123]

Meijer was famous for overbuilding early-on---their first Thrifty Acres in Grand Rapids supposedly had foot-thick concrete floors so if the concept failed they could sell it to an auto dealer.

[buckguy]

Walmart's high store volumes mean that comp percentage points are hard to attain, despite Wall Street's demands for them. They cannot afford to have negative comping stores even if they are profitable because of the impact low comps will play on their stock price.

This means that their stores are especially vulnerable to good competition like the Meijer described here. The Walmart might have a bottom line profit in the millions but the damage to the Walton family stock shares far outweighs those dollars so the store is closed immediately. You are correct that a good, competent national competitor would really hurt Walmart because of how they are evaluated and valued by investors.

This is precisely the reason why they closed all of those Sam's Clubs back in 2018. Costco is a good, competent national competitor and was hurting Sam's Club and Walmart as a whole.

Now Costco has made some missteps since then which has created an opening for Sam's.

In the 2023 closings there have been 2 closings directly related to Meijer.

South Bend, IN and Plainfield, IL

The Plainfield closing seems worse as it's a closing in an area that Walmart should be successful in. It's a clearly suburban area with a healthy retail corridor and I doubt shrink / theft is the reasoning there. There's a still open Kohl's, Menards, Target and Meijer nearby. This is the type of area that Walmart seems to do very well in in other markets. The store was also very recently renovated.

I can name at least three situations where a competitor opened (or revitalized) and Walmart gave up within less than a year. Costco opened a 2nd Tustin, CA store a mile from their other location and they gave up on their nearby Sam's Club within a year. (ironically it sat vacant several years then reopened as a Walmart). Costco opened a business center in Westminster, CA and Sam's closed their Stanton location a mile down the street, it had been fully remodeled to what was then their current prototype. And Walmart had a weird situation in Irvine, CA where they opened a store across the freeway from a busy Target. The Target went for almost two years with virtually no parking while a new parking structure was built for their use, and Walmart sales obviously went through the roof two years in a row. Target did take advantage of the lack of parking and completed a "Tier 1" full remodel while their business had slowed to a crawl. Then the new parking structure opened, Target got all of their business back and then some, and Walmart pulled the plug a year later (weeks after replacing all of the lighting in the store).

So three examples where a competition situation changed and they raised the white flag almost immediately. Costco had the most successful grand opening in the history of their US stores in Murrieta, CA last fall - a very fast growing area. I'm sure if there wasn't so much population growth the Murrieta Sam's Club would be closed for negative comps even though it is one of their top volume stores in the western US. Walmart just seems to have low tolerance for negative comps as well as shrink. They spend so little relative to other retailers on their infrastructure, fixtures etc. that they can afford to just walk away from the store and close down. I'm sure they have leases with easy exit clauses where they don't outright own their stores.

Walmart's failure to keep up with inflation with their same-store comps was buried in their last quarterly report. They had issued a "warning" before the report and then indicated better than expected performance, but it still looked they weren't making progress. They've been stagnating for years, so of course, they have some strong performers and some that aren't doing well and the reasons for each probably vary a bit from place to place. Their current script when they close stores is some sort of "review of operations" which could mean anything. Instantly going to shrink reminds of the old cunard that chains were dying because they were slow to enter the suburbs (yet had lots of stores there) or their stores weren't big enough (when the competition had plenty of similar stores). I doubt we'll see candor until they do something truly radical like sell-off bigger parts of teh business. Blaming shrink even in euphamistically described areas misses that many of those smae places have stores that have been doing fine for many years like Forman Mills in the Mid-Atlantic region. It's not just dollar stores that go where somebody like Target won't.

The thing I keep in mind about Walmart is that there was a time when they seemed tocapture a broader range of customers, even when they competed with Target and relatively solid KMarts. I lived in their territories in the late 80s and this was the case. I didn't live in their territory again untol the end of the 90s and it was evident that they were on their way to becoming the store for people without other options---the stores were neat and well stocked, but the service was non-existent and apathetic, most of the prices had no advantage over other stores (the LA Times did a systematic look at this in the '00s), and despite having more categories of merchandise, the selections often seemed limited within category. The clientele also was different--no longer fully reflective of the trading area. This was around the time that journalists began looking into their reliance on incentives, their abandonment of some communities (while not allowing new takers for their space), their strong arming of suppliers, etc. and it began to reach a point where even development-friendly juristictions didn't want their new locations anymore. Their non-food stagnation began long after and they began looking for other ways to increase profits like their ill-fated effort to enter banking.

Walmart possibily could have been a store with a somewhat different niche, but their model didn't really allow for that and if KMart had magically revived itself, their situation might have become more obvious sooner. They seem willing to make changes around teh margins--the smaller stores, adding more electronics, bringing organics into the food departments, but they haven't worked. They're about 15 years too late with online shopping---most bigboxes began accommodating this in a big way well before COVID. It will help them survive but it's probably too late to broaden their base.

Despite all the supercenters, I wouldn't be surprised if the more traditional stores with a mostly center store food operation might be their path for the future of brick and mortar, at least in places where they don't have a sizable grocery share--they have general merchandise which mostly has greater markups (esp. apparel) than food and they lose the expense of maintaining expensive refrigeration and other equipment and the expense of rotating perishable stock. Walmart is not good at localizing their operations (one reason they failed ina number of foreign countries, but likely true here), so I wonder if they would serously consider doing this---it may be that the market and efforts to cut costs on teh food side make it happen, slowly on its own.

[Romr123]

You may be onto something--I wonder if their niche is paradoxically shrinking in the last 20 years to a more rural, poorer client base as the politics in the US have similarly shifted...it's become a class signifier to lean toward or away from WM depending on politics both personal and local. I've got a friend who grew up in Maryville, MO (teachers' college town in the far northwestern corner an hour from St. Joseph/2+ hours from Kansas City) who always said WM was a much better experience in Maryville (where they appealed to everyone) than in Kansas City (where they weren't reaching everyone).

I wonder if that's not replicated in a lot of places around (raising the standards in the "teachers' college" towns while getting creamed in the turning-blue suburbs).

[jamcool]

You may be onto something--I wonder if their niche is paradoxically shrinking in the last 20 years to a more rural, poorer client base as the politics in the US have similarly shifted...it's become a class signifier to lean toward or away from WM depending on politics both personal and local. I've got a friend who grew up in Maryville, MO (teachers' college town in the far northwestern corner an hour from St. Joseph/2+ hours from Kansas City) who always said WM was a much better experience in Maryville (where they appealed to everyone) than in Kansas City (where they weren't reaching everyone).

I wonder if that's not replicated in a lot of places around (raising the standards in the "teachers' college" towns while getting creamed in the turning-blue suburbs).

Then Target would be doing better than they currently are.

[ClownLoach]

Wal Mart may not put much into infrastructure but when they built the buildings they built above average quality buildings during most of their major expansion period. If I look at the Washoe County Assessor site for Wal Mart, it shows most of their buildings are building quality C25 - Commercial Above Average.
https://www.washoecounty.gov/assessor/cama/
5065 Pyramid - Sparks - build 2005- C25 -owned
4855 Kietzke - Reno - build 1995 - C25 -owned
5260 West 7th - Reno - build 1995 - C25 -owned
155 Damonte Ranch- Reno- build 2001 - C25 -leased

250 Vista Knoll - Reno - build 2011 - this one is only C20-Commercial Average - owned
So it appears maybe with later stores they cheaped out.

Can't tell on 2425 Second Street - Reno since it is on Reno Sparks Indian Colony land

Also funny the Reno Sam's at 4835 Kietzke Lane built in 2002 is C10-Commercial Low building quality.

Most retail buildings around town are C20 - Commercial Average. Dillards- great looking store to me- but only a C20.

This includes the local Target Stores at 6845 Sierra Center in Reno and 1550 E. Lincoln in Sparks both owned by Target and both C20 quality.

Some of these ratings given by governmental agencies for the purpose of tax assessments are not exactly aligned with current trends. For example if the facility has a drop ceiling, where all lighting and ductwork is concealed then it would typically be rated as a "better" quality building than a more contemporary open warehouse ceiling. Same for linoleum floors vs polished concrete. Technically drop ceilings and linoleum floors are considered more expensive even though they're now outdated. I know nothing of the stores you've mentioned but I've seen this type of situation elsewhere. One of my worst, most dated stores was assessed as most valuable in the county because it had woodgrain slat walls (instead of drywall), recessed fluorescent tubes on a drop ceiling, and an elevator. It was the worst building I had. My shiny new store nearby with warehouse ceiling, beautiful full spectrum LED lights and skylights, and polished floor was considered low end.

[arizonaguy]

This is precisely the reason why they closed all of those Sam's Clubs back in 2018. Costco is a good, competent national competitor and was hurting Sam's Club and Walmart as a whole.

Now Costco has made some missteps since then which has created an opening for Sam's.

In the 2023 closings there have been 2 closings directly related to Meijer.

South Bend, IN and Plainfield, IL

The Plainfield closing seems worse as it's a closing in an area that Walmart should be successful in. It's a clearly suburban area with a healthy retail corridor and I doubt shrink / theft is the reasoning there. There's a still open Kohl's, Menards, Target and Meijer nearby. This is the type of area that Walmart seems to do very well in in other markets. The store was also very recently renovated.

I can name at least three situations where a competitor opened (or revitalized) and Walmart gave up within less than a year. Costco opened a 2nd Tustin, CA store a mile from their other location and they gave up on their nearby Sam's Club within a year. (ironically it sat vacant several years then reopened as a Walmart). Costco opened a business center in Westminster, CA and Sam's closed their Stanton location a mile down the street, it had been fully remodeled to what was then their current prototype. And Walmart had a weird situation in Irvine, CA where they opened a store across the freeway from a busy Target. The Target went for almost two years with virtually no parking while a new parking structure was built for their use, and Walmart sales obviously went through the roof two years in a row. Target did take advantage of the lack of parking and completed a "Tier 1" full remodel while their business had slowed to a crawl. Then the new parking structure opened, Target got all of their business back and then some, and Walmart pulled the plug a year later (weeks after replacing all of the lighting in the store).

So three examples where a competition situation changed and they raised the white flag almost immediately. Costco had the most successful grand opening in the history of their US stores in Murrieta, CA last fall - a very fast growing area. I'm sure if there wasn't so much population growth the Murrieta Sam's Club would be closed for negative comps even though it is one of their top volume stores in the western US. Walmart just seems to have low tolerance for negative comps as well as shrink. They spend so little relative to other retailers on their infrastructure, fixtures etc. that they can afford to just walk away from the store and close down. I'm sure they have leases with easy exit clauses where they don't outright own their stores.

Walmart's failure to keep up with inflation with their same-store comps was buried in their last quarterly report. They had issued a "warning" before the report and then indicated better than expected performance, but it still looked they weren't making progress. They've been stagnating for years, so of course, they have some strong performers and some that aren't doing well and the reasons for each probably vary a bit from place to place. Their current script when they close stores is some sort of "review of operations" which could mean anything. Instantly going to shrink reminds of the old cunard that chains were dying because they were slow to enter the suburbs (yet had lots of stores there) or their stores weren't big enough (when the competition had plenty of similar stores). I doubt we'll see candor until they do something truly radical like sell-off bigger parts of teh business. Blaming shrink even in euphamistically described areas misses that many of those smae places have stores that have been doing fine for many years like Forman Mills in the Mid-Atlantic region. It's not just dollar stores that go where somebody like Target won't.

The thing I keep in mind about Walmart is that there was a time when they seemed tocapture a broader range of customers, even when they competed with Target and relatively solid KMarts. I lived in their territories in the late 80s and this was the case. I didn't live in their territory again untol the end of the 90s and it was evident that they were on their way to becoming the store for people without other options---the stores were neat and well stocked, but the service was non-existent and apathetic, most of the prices had no advantage over other stores (the LA Times did a systematic look at this in the '00s), and despite having more categories of merchandise, the selections often seemed limited within category. The clientele also was different--no longer fully reflective of the trading area. This was around the time that journalists began looking into their reliance on incentives, their abandonment of some communities (while not allowing new takers for their space), their strong arming of suppliers, etc. and it began to reach a point where even development-friendly juristictions didn't want their new locations anymore. Their non-food stagnation began long after and they began looking for other ways to increase profits like their ill-fated effort to enter banking.

Walmart possibily could have been a store with a somewhat different niche, but their model didn't really allow for that and if KMart had magically revived itself, their situation might have become more obvious sooner. They seem willing to make changes around teh margins--the smaller stores, adding more electronics, bringing organics into the food departments, but they haven't worked. They're about 15 years too late with online shopping---most bigboxes began accommodating this in a big way well before COVID. It will help them survive but it's probably too late to broaden their base.

Despite all the supercenters, I wouldn't be surprised if the more traditional stores with a mostly center store food operation might be their path for the future of brick and mortar, at least in places where they don't have a sizable grocery share--they have general merchandise which mostly has greater markups (esp. apparel) than food and they lose the expense of maintaining expensive refrigeration and other equipment and the expense of rotating perishable stock. Walmart is not good at localizing their operations (one reason they failed ina number of foreign countries, but likely true here), so I wonder if they would serously consider doing this---it may be that the market and efforts to cut costs on teh food side make it happen, slowly on its own.

The problem with Walmart is that by the mid 2000s (2005 or so) they essentially had stores everywhere that could support a Walmart store (due to their massive expansion in the 1990s and early 2000s) but spent the next decade 2005 - 2015 or so building and/or opening up stores in places that they had no business being because they couldn't grow organically anymore. They would open a Neighborhood Market in a space that formerly housed a supermarket. They would open supercenters in former Kmarts, Mervyn's or mall department store anchor pads. They didn't seem to care about the demographic trends of the neighborhoods they entered either, it seemed like they were just trying to cram as many stores into as many urban areas as they could. It's no surprise that it's these 2005 - 2015 stores that are failing. Walmart should've never been there in the first place but they weren't putting as much emphasis online so these were the last frontier where they could attempt to open physical stores. The Neighborhood Market concept was also borne out of the idea of getting Walmart's grocery business into areas it couldn't reach with its supercenters.

Another problem is that starting in the early 2000s the dollar stores (Dollar General and Family Dollar)rapidly spread and penetrated it's core rural areas. In many of these places, Walmart was essentially the only full line store (although one would sometimes have to drive a ways to get to a Walmart). With Dollar General and Family Dollar opening up "neighborhood" rural stores, a lot of HBA, dry goods, and mid-week grocery trips were diverted from Walmart to Dollar General or Family Dollar. Walmart realized this in the mid 2010s and tried to blunt the trend of losing this business with its Walmart Express concept which ended up being an abject failure.

There also seems to have been a lot of recent growth in the "farm and fleet" segment of retailing. These hybrid hardware / general merchandise / feed stores have to take another bite out of Walmart's traditional customer base. A former Walmart customer can now get almost everything they need at a combination of a Dollar General / Family Dollar and Rural King / Tractor Supply / etc.

While all of this was going on Walmart made the decision to try to move away from it's "Always low prices" slogan and model to the "Save money, Live better" slogan and resulting price increases as it tried to move upmarket in an attempt to reach more middle to upper middle class shoppers. This move, along with a corresponding cut in SKUs, alienated some of Walmart's working class base (and drove customers to Dollar Genera / Family Dollar as those chains were expanding). Walmart continues to try to attract these upmarket customers with Walmart+ and Walmart.com but the problem is that even before 2008 Walmart lost most of these customers to Amazon and Target and isn't obtaining them back.

I'm not ready to say that Walmart is dying. It's two largest competitors on the general merchandise side, Amazon and Target have their own issues right now. Amazon's first party retail business is not profitable, never has been profitable and has to be subsidized by other areas of Amazon's business that are now less profitable than they were before. Amazon, not Walmart, seems to be the modern day Sears and seems destined to have the same future that Sears had. Profitable parts of Amazon such as AWS will probably survive but the massive money pit of a retail operation that Amazon currently operates will look very different in the not too distant future. We're already seeing consumer unfriendly changes to try to prop up the retail business but probably will simply turn off customers from it.

Target seems to have lost its way and the recent remodels with odd product assortment / space allocations (such as the massive amount of prime space devoted to beauty at a recently renovated store near me), not to mention the fact that Target, even more so than Walmart, has invested heavily in stores in areas where shoplifting prevention and enforcement is difficult,

Walmart's other major, almost nationwide, competitor Kroger (on the food side) is in the midst of attempting to facilitate a merger that will do nothing but weaken itself. The merger will draw attention away from improvements on price, store conditions, merchandising, etc; and will likely lead to Kroger having to increase its pricing.

I believe Walmart now is pretty analogous to how Sam's Club was in 2018. It's in okay shape, it has some problems, it needs to make up for poor real estate decisions, but if it can stay the course while its major competitors deal with major issues of their own, I believe it can come out ahead. I do think Walmart needs to open some new stores in some suburban / exurban / rural areas though.

[pseudo3d]

Walmart's failure to keep up with inflation with their same-store comps was buried in their last quarterly report. They had issued a "warning" before the report and then indicated better than expected performance, but it still looked they weren't making progress. They've been stagnating for years, so of course, they have some strong performers and some that aren't doing well and the reasons for each probably vary a bit from place to place. Their current script when they close stores is some sort of "review of operations" which could mean anything. Instantly going to shrink reminds of the old cunard that chains were dying because they were slow to enter the suburbs (yet had lots of stores there) or their stores weren't big enough (when the competition had plenty of similar stores). I doubt we'll see candor until they do something truly radical like sell-off bigger parts of teh business. Blaming shrink even in euphamistically described areas misses that many of those smae places have stores that have been doing fine for many years like Forman Mills in the Mid-Atlantic region. It's not just dollar stores that go where somebody like Target won't.

The thing I keep in mind about Walmart is that there was a time when they seemed tocapture a broader range of customers, even when they competed with Target and relatively solid KMarts. I lived in their territories in the late 80s and this was the case. I didn't live in their territory again untol the end of the 90s and it was evident that they were on their way to becoming the store for people without other options---the stores were neat and well stocked, but the service was non-existent and apathetic, most of the prices had no advantage over other stores (the LA Times did a systematic look at this in the '00s), and despite having more categories of merchandise, the selections often seemed limited within category. The clientele also was different--no longer fully reflective of the trading area. This was around the time that journalists began looking into their reliance on incentives, their abandonment of some communities (while not allowing new takers for their space), their strong arming of suppliers, etc. and it began to reach a point where even development-friendly juristictions didn't want their new locations anymore. Their non-food stagnation began long after and they began looking for other ways to increase profits like their ill-fated effort to enter banking.

Walmart possibily could have been a store with a somewhat different niche, but their model didn't really allow for that and if KMart had magically revived itself, their situation might have become more obvious sooner. They seem willing to make changes around teh margins--the smaller stores, adding more electronics, bringing organics into the food departments, but they haven't worked. They're about 15 years too late with online shopping---most bigboxes began accommodating this in a big way well before COVID. It will help them survive but it's probably too late to broaden their base.

Despite all the supercenters, I wouldn't be surprised if the more traditional stores with a mostly center store food operation might be their path for the future of brick and mortar, at least in places where they don't have a sizable grocery share--they have general merchandise which mostly has greater markups (esp. apparel) than food and they lose the expense of maintaining expensive refrigeration and other equipment and the expense of rotating perishable stock. Walmart is not good at localizing their operations (one reason they failed ina number of foreign countries, but likely true here), so I wonder if they would serously consider doing this---it may be that the market and efforts to cut costs on teh food side make it happen, slowly on its own.

The problem with Walmart is that by the mid 2000s (2005 or so) they essentially had stores everywhere that could support a Walmart store (due to their massive expansion in the 1990s and early 2000s) but spent the next decade 2005 - 2015 or so building and/or opening up stores in places that they had no business being because they couldn't grow organically anymore. They would open a Neighborhood Market in a space that formerly housed a supermarket. They would open supercenters in former Kmarts, Mervyn's or mall department store anchor pads. They didn't seem to care about the demographic trends of the neighborhoods they entered either, it seemed like they were just trying to cram as many stores into as many urban areas as they could. It's no surprise that it's these 2005 - 2015 stores that are failing. Walmart should've never been there in the first place but they weren't putting as much emphasis online so these were the last frontier where they could attempt to open physical stores. The Neighborhood Market concept was also borne out of the idea of getting Walmart's grocery business into areas it couldn't reach with its supercenters.

Another problem is that starting in the early 2000s the dollar stores (Dollar General and Family Dollar)rapidly spread and penetrated it's core rural areas. In many of these places, Walmart was essentially the only full line store (although one would sometimes have to drive a ways to get to a Walmart). With Dollar General and Family Dollar opening up "neighborhood" rural stores, a lot of HBA, dry goods, and mid-week grocery trips were diverted from Walmart to Dollar General or Family Dollar. Walmart realized this in the mid 2010s and tried to blunt the trend of losing this business with its Walmart Express concept which ended up being an abject failure.

There also seems to have been a lot of recent growth in the "farm and fleet" segment of retailing. These hybrid hardware / general merchandise / feed stores have to take another bite out of Walmart's traditional customer base. A former Walmart customer can now get almost everything they need at a combination of a Dollar General / Family Dollar and Rural King / Tractor Supply / etc.

While all of this was going on Walmart made the decision to try to move away from it's "Always low prices" slogan and model to the "Save money, Live better" slogan and resulting price increases as it tried to move upmarket in an attempt to reach more middle to upper middle class shoppers. This move, along with a corresponding cut in SKUs, alienated some of Walmart's working class base (and drove customers to Dollar Genera / Family Dollar as those chains were expanding). Walmart continues to try to attract these upmarket customers with Walmart+ and Walmart.com but the problem is that even before 2008 Walmart lost most of these customers to Amazon and Target and isn't obtaining them back.

I'm not ready to say that Walmart is dying. It's two largest competitors on the general merchandise side, Amazon and Target have their own issues right now. Amazon's first party retail business is not profitable, never has been profitable and has to be subsidized by other areas of Amazon's business that are now less profitable than they were before. Amazon, not Walmart, seems to be the modern day Sears and seems destined to have the same future that Sears had. Profitable parts of Amazon such as AWS will probably survive but the massive money pit of a retail operation that Amazon currently operates will look very different in the not too distant future. We're already seeing consumer unfriendly changes to try to prop up the retail business but probably will simply turn off customers from it.

Target seems to have lost its way and the recent remodels with odd product assortment / space allocations (such as the massive amount of prime space devoted to beauty at a recently renovated store near me), not to mention the fact that Target, even more so than Walmart, has invested heavily in stores in areas where shoplifting prevention and enforcement is difficult,

Walmart's other major, almost nationwide, competitor Kroger (on the food side) is in the midst of attempting to facilitate a merger that will do nothing but weaken itself. The merger will draw attention away from improvements on price, store conditions, merchandising, etc; and will likely lead to Kroger having to increase its pricing.

I believe Walmart now is pretty analogous to how Sam's Club was in 2018. It's in okay shape, it has some problems, it needs to make up for poor real estate decisions, but if it can stay the course while its major competitors deal with major issues of their own, I believe it can come out ahead. I do think Walmart needs to open some new stores in some suburban / exurban / rural areas though.

Walmart Express didn't really work partly because they were small markets and they already had a Dollar General. They weren't even Division 1 stores and ended up not really find a niche. The problem with Walmart is that a lot of its expansions and ventures have all been failures. Store prototypes and expansions that end up closing down within a few years, online acquisitions that get shut down or sold, and an indelible reputation of "trash company for trash people" that harms any attempts to move upscale.

But Walmart is in many ways is in a better position than Amazon, despite not being as trendy. I can't imagine Amazon's retail business was never profitable but overbuilding warehouses for Prime must be cutting into profits...and of course, Amazon Fresh has gone from a pet project in a few cities to a billion-dollar disaster that can't just be written off.