june-2011

Li le
Boxes
Can Walmart get bigger
by going smaller?
58 JUNE 2011 • HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
BY KEVIN GRAY
bright ideas
IN THE BEGINNING, Walmart spread across the land. It erected
185,000-square-foot megastores that devoured mom-and-pop
shops and vacuumed bargain-hunters into its sliding doors by the
millions. It became the world’s biggest and most feared retailer.
But it was stopped at the gates of cities—by labor unions and
community activists who railed against its size and its might—
and made to bide its time in the countryside. Until it came upon
a plan: to make itself very small, no bigger than a McMansion,
and slip on in.
This is Walmart’s Trojan Horse moment. The globe-straddling
giant that changed the way we shop has hit on a plan to crack
the dense and lucrative urban markets that have long shut it
out. “We have been hard at work on this roughly 15,000-squarefoot
model,” Bill Simon, the president and CEO of Walmart U.S.,
told a banking conference in March. It’s part of a wider go-small
strategy for the retail behemoth that includes mini-box stores
for cities, suburbs and even college campuses. Within the year,
Walmart plans to build 30 to 40 such “Express” stores. “We are
going to be adding hundreds of these in the coming years and
maybe even more depending on how they work out,” Simon said.
So secretive are Walmart’s new plans that Simon joked that a
“secret handshake” was needed to learn the details: “There are
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF WALMART; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY TIM VIENCKOWSKI