This month, Wal-Mart closed more than 100 stores globally, leaving small towns and rural areas to fend for themselves by ending one of its latest retail experiments, Walmart Express. Launched in 2011, Wal-Mart's Express had little similitude to the traditional Wal-Mart Supercenters, which average 180,00 square feet in size and carry around 100,000 stock-keeping units. The express stores were only 12,000 to 15,000 square feet in size, comparing to the average Walgreen's. Wal-Mart hoped its price advantage would help contribute to the smaller stores and that would complement trips to the supercenters. But, the company may have overlooked some barriers in doing so.
Here are some facts to lay down, 56% of the company's sales now come from groceries. The Supercenters and Neighborhood Markets depend mostly on normal traffic from food shoppers to take over its other retail departments, and its enlargement into groceries over say the last 20 years has been mainly the dominant of sales growth. The Neighborhood Markets have been so successful because the fact that they are entirely grocery stores. These express stores were to small to fill the needs of the customers, nonetheless carried products like tissue , and toys as well as some fresh foods and also a pharmacy. Wal-Mart made several other mistakes on the wholesale level, clearly shrinking their Supercenters to fit into a much more compact size instead of developing a plan around the configuration. It stocked multiple brands of the same item, costing space, and consumers often felt product selection was not satisfying. The company did not have data nor experience with consumer selection in such stores the way its competitors did, and it was eager to adapt feedback. Concluding that many of the stores were basically cannibalized by Supercenters, underscoring a larger problem with the Express format.
Written by Carlos Marrow
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