Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer, March 24, 2012
Supercenters, which average more than four times the size of a typical grocery store, sell everything a regular Walmart store does, plus baked goods, deli items, frozen foods, meat, dairy, snacks and produce. In many communities it’s a problem when the big box retailer moves their operation somewhere else. “We’re seeing this all over the country, where Walmart is abandoning stores that in many cases are not that old and moving down the street or a mile down the road to build a new Supercenter” on vacant land, said Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis and author of “Big Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses.” Unlike older buildings in most business districts that can accommodate different uses over the years, Walmart’s cavernous, windowless buildings “are built to spec for a specific use” that make them hard to adapt to other tenants, she said. “There just aren’t many retailers who need more than 100,000 square feet.”
