Dive Brief:
- Wal-Mart will open 300 small-footprint stores in the next year -- twice as many as the retailer had planned earlier.
- About 180-200 will be what the company calls Neighborhood Markets, which measure about 38,000 square feet. The remainder will be the smaller Wal-Mart Express format, which the company has been testing in urban areas.
- The new emphasis on smaller formats was announced by Wal-Mart's CEO Doug McMillon at the company's annual shareholders meeting.
Dive Insight:
The company that put the "big" in big-box retailer wants to be more of a little-box retailer.
That may prove to be a very wise move. First, those massive stores (the average Supercenter is 182,000 square feet) have no future in the re-urbanization shift among young adults. Second, those parts of the country where people drive everywhere are already filled with Supercenters. If Walmart wants growth, it has to build smaller stores.
But Walmart is not ready (yet) to expand an experiment in super-small-format shops. The company did not announce plans to build more of its experimental c-stores.