LA Chinatown, a historical and cultural center, will have a new retailer joining the ranks. An area most known for small mom-and-pop type businesses will soon be contending with the muscle of the world’s biggest retailer.
Walmart (NYSE:WMT) announced plans to open a 33,000-square-foot grocery store on the edge of L.A.’s Chinatown. Wal-Mart spokesman Steven Restivo said the store would be roughly one-fifth the size of a typical Wal-Mart store and the first of the company’s so-called Neighborhood Markets to open in Los Angeles County, as reported by the LA Times.
Walmart is executing its aggressive growth plans, the company’s top financial priority for 2012. The US expansion plans call smaller formats, including both grocery stores and even smaller, convenience formats to be introduced in major metropolitan areas.
Walmart plans to add hundreds of small stores to its chain. Bill Simon, President and CEO stated, “We are going to be adding hundreds of these in the coming years, and maybe more, depending on how these work out,” as reported by the
The announcement of the LA store has not been well received by all local groups. Sissy Trinh, executive director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance (SEACA) said in a statement “We’re concerned that our historic community is going to be negatively affected by the development of this Walmart,” said. “The reality is that our local businesses that have serviced the Asian community for generations will likely get squeezed out of Chinatown.”
Walmart is set on fueling its growth through store expansion and with lowering prices items to bring back shoppers on limited budgets that started to shop at dollar stores and elsewhere.
In the 2011 Q4 earnings report filed last week, Walmart U.S. posted a 1.5 percent increase in sales at stores open at least a year. This is the company’s second quarter of same-store sales increases after experiencing nine quarters of same-store sales decreases.
