Article

Top 100: 18. Smaller store formats

August 14, 2011

Taking its Neighborhood Market store concept a step further, big box champion Walmart is planning to open several dozen scaled-down stores throughout Chicago over the next five years, some no bigger than a 7-Eleven. Conceived as a strategy for gaining entry into urban areas where its supercenters (average size, 185,000 feet) either wouldn’t fit or weren’t welcome, the smaller-format also stores will give Walmart the opportunity to enter rural communities that are too small to support a supercenter. The trend toward smaller-footprint stores generally is credited to the pioneering efforts of Tesco’s Fresh & Easy concept, but, in many ways, it was a natural and cyclical reaction to the “bigger is better” mentality, one that has no doubt been helped along by the appeal of folksier retailers such as Whole Foods and The Fresh Market.

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