Walmart observations

Predicting the demise of Sears & Kmart since 2017!
storewanderer
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by storewanderer »

Alpha8472 wrote: May 6th, 2022, 5:24 pm Walmart does not seem interested in gas stations as much these days.

There is a Sam's Club in Concord, California that was built without a gas station. Even though there is a Costco in the same city, Sam's Club never opened up a gas station. This put Sam's Club at a disadvantage. The Costco does tons of business, but Sam's Club is empty of customers. There is no Target or Walmart in this city. So this city only has Costco or Sam's Club to choose from. Adding a gas station would drastically increase sales at Sam's Club. I did not renew my membership at Sam's Club due to the lack of gas.

Right now Walmart is advertising gas discounts at Exxon and Mobil if you have a Walmart Plus membership. Walmart wants to attract customers by offering gas discounts. It is just that the discounts for gas are not at Walmart gas stations.

You pay for gas through the Walmart app when you are at Exxon or Mobil. You get ten cents off per gallon.
Do they have room for a gas station? Is that the store that is a former Pace next to the airport in Concord?

Wal Mart is building a new gas station in Sacramento and opened a new one in Linda (Marysville) last year.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by storewanderer »

wnetmacman wrote: May 6th, 2022, 10:58 am

It may be more complicated than that....

Usually when any petroleum marketer has a lease, it's an exclusive one, meaning if they can't operate on the property, nobody else can. Those leases are pretty ironclad. That's probably why they are being removed.
In this case Wal Mart was the landlord on the stations. Tesoro was the tenant leasing the site from Wal Mart.



This was the first sign of trouble. The locations have slowly closed ever since.
https://www.cspdailynews.com/fuels/teso ... -mirastars

It is funny how Murphy USA was able to make such a successful business out of these Wal Mart stations yet Tesoro couldn't figure it out. Not sure what the issue was. Murphy also ended up buying the real estate on 700+ of the gas stations, then Wal Mart decided to quit letting Murphy develop stations on their lots and said Wal Mart would be developing the stations on their own.

Murphy did assume the rights to develop stations in some of the states that Tesoro once had the rights to but abandoned, notably Colorado and Kansas.

Murphy stands a bigger windfall once Wal Mart stops selling tobacco products also. Murphy is an interesting operator. Probably the most successful at running kiosk gas stations I've seen.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by Alpha8472 »

The Sam's Club in Concord is near the airport. The parking lot is huge and there is plenty of room for a gas station. I don't know why there is no gas station there. You literally have private jets parked not too far from the store. They probably thought that having a gas station so close to the airport would be a hazard.

Concord was the scene of a deadly mall plane crash. The airport has an unmanned tower at night. The planes have to land on their own. One foggy night a private plane crashed into the roof of the nearby Sunvalley Mall during the Christmas shopping season. Many people were killed or burned. The mall caught on fire. To this day the mall still has to have extra beams supporting the ceiling to prevent the center of the mall in front of Macy's from collapsing.

This airport is blamed for making pilots land on their own.

Concord was strange in that it used to have a warehouse store in the 90s. I believe that it was called Price Club. This was long before Costco built a new store in the city in the early 2000s.

The Price Club was converted into an office building. It was an interesting conversion.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by buckguy »

Warehouse stores go back to the 50s. The membership was a way to dodge "fair trade" pricing (enforcement of manufacturers' suggested retail price) by being a club and operating as a "wholesale" business. The membership model also was a way to get around blue laws. They were run like PXs which were familiar to people who had been in the military during the WWII/Korea eras. They were more popular on the West Coast than in the East or Midwest and died out in most places with rise of non-membership chains and decline of fair trade and blue laws. Lucky owned Memco (in the East) and Gemco (in the West). Some converted to non-membership stores like EJ Korvette.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by BillyGr »

buckguy wrote: May 8th, 2022, 5:43 am Warehouse stores go back to the 50s. The membership was a way to dodge "fair trade" pricing (enforcement of manufacturers' suggested retail price) by being a club and operating as a "wholesale" business. The membership model also was a way to get around blue laws. They were run like PXs which were familiar to people who had been in the military during the WWII/Korea eras. They were more popular on the West Coast than in the East or Midwest and died out in most places with rise of non-membership chains and decline of fair trade and blue laws. Lucky owned Memco (in the East) and Gemco (in the West). Some converted to non-membership stores like EJ Korvette.
Actually, I remember reading that Korvette was a membership store at the beginning as well - they just didn't charge for their memberships, but people did need one of their cards to enter.
I believe that was for the same reason you mention above about offering cheaper prices than they could have otherwise.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by jamcool »

Sol Price founded Fed Mart in San Diego in the 1950s-as a membership store for government employees, by the 60s membership went away and FM became a regular discount store like KMart and Target. In the 70s Price sold FedMart to a German retailer, who ran it into the ground. By that time Sol started another chain with the same membership club format- Price Club, also beginning in San Diego.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by Brian Lutz »

Back in the late eighties and early 90s HomeClub tried applying the membership model to a big box home improvement store (this was back when big box stores were relatively new, the Home Depot/Lowes/Menards oligopoly in the market hadn't been established, and other competitors like Eagle Hardware and Builders Square were still around.) I remember that one opened next door to the Price Club in Albuquerque, and that you didn't have to have a membership to shop there but you would have to pay a 10% surcharge to shop there without a membership. Eventually the memberships went away and the chain rebranded to HomeBase, and they hung on until going bankrupt in 2000.

I know of two former HomeBase stores in the local area; one was behind the Kirkland Fred Meyer and first became one of two Costco Furniture stores (the other was in Arizona) before Costco abandoned that concept, and the building then sat for several years before the City of Kirkland bought the property. The building now holds the Kirkland Police Department headquarters, Municipal court and City Jail. Another former HomeBase store in Everett is now a WinCo Foods store. I also see that there is one home improvement store in Copperas Cove Texas operating under the name of Home Base, although I have no idea if they have any relation to the original chain.
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by jamcool »

I remember having a Gemco lifetime membership card..it was $1
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by storewanderer »

Alpha8472 wrote: May 7th, 2022, 9:39 pm The Sam's Club in Concord is near the airport. The parking lot is huge and there is plenty of room for a gas station. I don't know why there is no gas station there. You literally have private jets parked not too far from the store. They probably thought that having a gas station so close to the airport would be a hazard.
That is my suspicion that there is some issue where they don't want to put a gas station so close to the runway.

Yet the airport has fuel for the planes...
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Re: Walmart observations

Post by SamSpade »

jamcool wrote: May 8th, 2022, 11:03 pm I remember having a Gemco lifetime membership card..it was $1
Well, if we're rolling off topic like this... :-)
Bi-Mart lifetime membership is $5.
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