When it opened in July 2013, the Walmart Neighborhood Market at 7809 N.E. Vancouver Plaza Drive joined a growing segment for the retailing giant.
It was one of 79 Neighborhood Markets that Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart Inc. opened that year in the U.S. That was followed in 2014 by another 122 Neighborhood Markets and 235 more the following year.
At approximately 42,000 square feet, the Vancouver Plaza store fell smack dab in the middle of the typical size for a Neighborhood Market, a concept first introduced in 1998. The market, a grocery and pharmacy, was a break from the has-everything Walmart.
On Wednesday, however, Walmart announced the Vancouver Plaza store would join the ranks of a less-desirable segment that emerged in 2016: stores that have closed.
The Vancouver Plaza store will close April 19, the company said.
“The decision is based on several factors including the store’s overall performance,” Tiffany Wilson, Walmart communications director, said in a statement.
The pharmacy will close earlier, on April 5. Pharmacy staff will work with customers to transfer prescriptions to the Neighborhood Market at 2201 Grand Blvd., in central Vancouver, the company said.
The store’s 81 employees, called associates, will be offered the chance to move to another Walmart. “Our HR teams will help identify transfer opportunities and assist associates through the transfer process,” a statement says.
To be sure, Walmart remains huge, with more than 5,000 retail units in the U.S., including more than 3,500 Supercenters, more than 300 Discount Stores, nearly 700 Neighborhood Markets, about 100 Small Format stores and almost 700 Sam’s Clubs. The company had sales of $495.76 billion in 2018, a 3 percent increase over the previous year.
But something unusual in the Walmart trajectory happened in 2016. The retailer began closing stores, at greater numbers than had been seen. “A rare retreat for the behemoth on its home turf,” the Wall Street Journal said.
Among Neighborhood Markets, 133 of them closed in 2016 in the U.S., compared with three the previous year and zero before that. Also, 16 Supercenters closed in 2016 nationwide. Last year, 20 Neighborhood Markets closed nationwide. Besides the Vancouver Neighborhood Market, five other stores are slated this year to close.
On the other hand, new Walmarts continued to open: 161 Neighborhood Markets and 55 Supercenters in 2016. And last year, 85 Neighborhood Markets opened. Until now the company had not closed any stores in the Vancouver-Portland market in several years, a spokesperson said.
But the fact that Walmart is retrenching at all on its physical locations is yet another example that the shopping habits of Americans are changing, altered by e-commerce and grocery home delivery.
Closing stores “is done on a case-by-case basis,” the company said in a statement to The Columbian. “These are never easy decisions, but actively managing our portfolio is essential to maintaining a healthy business and keeping current with how customers want to shop today.”
The Vancouver Plaza store, formerly a WinCo, was Vancouver’s first Walmart grocery-only concept store. The location was vacant for roughly five years after WinCo opened a standalone store about a mile away in 2008 at 2101 N.E. Andresen Road.
Besides the Neighborhood Market at 2201 Grand Blvd., the other Walmarts remaining in the Vancouver area include a Walmart at 9000 N.E. Highway 99, and Walmart Supercenters at 221E N.E. 104th Ave., 14505 N.E. Fourth Plain Blvd., and 430 S.E. 192nd Ave. Also, there’s a Supercenter in Battle Ground at 1201 S.W. 13th Ave. and another in Woodland, at 1486 Dike Access Road.
