There's a miniature Wal-Mart outside Charlotte, one of only 10 in the nation, and this pea-sized version of the biggest mega-retailer could be the precursor of a major shift away from big-box strategy.
As detailed in this blog post from UNC-Charlotte's Urban Institute, the Wal-Mart Express is a 15,000 square foot store about 30 miles outside of Charlotte, in Stanly County. At that square footage, the Express store is barely 1/12th the size of a standard Wal-Mart Supercenter and not even twice as large as the average Family Dollar.
So why would a retailer that made its name gobbling up greenfield sites by the hundreds of acres even contemplate downsizing? Wal-Mart has been under-performing smaller stores for several years now, with a well-publicized U.S. sales slide that lasted for longer than two years. During the same time, at the height of the recession, the popularity of discount retailers Family Dollar, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree exploded.
The smaller stores are located either in rural areas too small to support a big box, or in urban areas too small to fit one. In a city like Charlotte, customers in many neighborhoods can either drive or take a bus to Wal-Mart or walk to a Family Dollar. This ease of accessibility, combined with low prices, helped lure in many customers who might otherwise have gone to Wal-Mart.
Dollar stores were quick to recognize and capitalize on this trend. They've added a much wider assortment of groceries and consumable goods - Family Dollar just added cigarettes - and shifted away from former dollar store staples such as low-priced apparel. Stanly County's Wal-Mart Express is next to a Dollar General.
Both dollar stores and mega-retailers have emerged as major grocery players (Wal-Mart just overtook Harris Teeter as the number one grocery retailer in the Charlotte region), but dollar stores seem more suited to the "fill-in trip," that mid-week dash for milk and eggs. A smaller Wal-Mart format positions the retailer to capture more of that traffic as well.
It remains to be seen if the Wal-Mart Express experiment will succeed, or ever pop up in Charlotte itself. Until then, you can drive to Richfield, Stanly County, if you want to get a peek into the future.
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