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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

And Walmart plans to open 405 stores globally in the coming year. 95 percent of the closed U.S. stores are within 10 miles of another Walmart store. They're just consolidating smaller stores into bigger ones. They experimented with express stores 5 years ago, found it didn't work as well as hoped, so they canned them. These decisions make strong business sense.

The article makes it seem like it is doom and gloom for the company but they are doing just fine.

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Thanks for the 95% closing stat being stores that are close together. My wife and I live in a small town in the mountains of Central Arizona and we have a Walmart store in the closest big town (60K population) that is just a 20 minute drive. We both like and rely on that store. There are no other Walmart stores within about 60 miles of that one, so hopefully it is safe. This store is a major employer in the area. It would be a bummer if those already marginalized workers lost their jobs.

"Just" a 20 min drive.

That statmeent is the reason every bricks & mortar European retailer has failed in the US. Very interesting.

I live in Vancouver BC. To my knowledge, we don't have a Walmart within the city, the nearest location to downtown being in North Van, a suburb located across the Burrard Inlet and certainly more than 20 mins by car from downtown. 20 minutes ain't too bad.

What? There are plenty of European retailers that do well in the US... IKEA, H&M, Zara, etc.

There's a list of stores closing on their press release. None of them are in Arizona so I think you're fine.

Press release - https://news.walmart.com/news-archive/2016/01/15/walmart-con...

Closure map - https://i.imgur.com/jTgNt21.jpg

Payson by chance? Still blows my mind that Prescott/PV have 3 walmarts.

No, we live in Sedona and drive to the Cottonwood store.

  >> It would be a bummer if those already marginalized workers lost their jobs.

Unless people on average switch to buying more on-line, the local job market should just switch to different stores.

Not sure why this is a controversial statement.

Walmart is often critized for hurting local jobs - replacing successful independant business owners with lower-paid employee jobs. If this is true, Walmart leaving an area should be (at worst) job-neutral.

If Wal-Mart were to close more than just the "Express" stores, it would take a while for those local businesses to reestablish themselves and start hiring. It wouldn't likely be job neutral for a long time and in some areas might just permanently disrupt the community.

I didn't really get doom and gloom from the article - most of the statements were either factual (for example, commenting that the express stores made up less than 1% of global revenue), or what I would consider to be fairly apt speculation (suggesting that closing express stores reflects that Walmart didn't see the business it had hoped, this suggestion coming right after a paragraph that explains the function of the Express Stores).

I mean, the comments they had from analysts even basically echoed your sentiment that it's just business sense, so I'm not sure how you got Doom and Gloom from the article. The title is a bit bait-ish I guess, but the rest is fairly normal reporting.

Three Walmart Express stores in north Alabama have opened in approximately the last year; one of those (New Hope or Owen's Crossroads; can't remember where it is exactly) had just opened a couple weeks ago. It might be within 10 miles of a supercenter while the other two are not. None of the three have been open long enough to force their competition out of business, fortunately.

Your "experimented with express stores 5 years ago" doesn't quite catch the nuance of this change. All of these stores are new construction---there's a fair bit of sunk capital involved.

Walmart is flailing.

Good point. Several other retailers (Sears, Footlocker, Macy's) are also closing stores but the difference is that Wal Mart is planning on opening stores in stronger markets whereas those other retailers are not.

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