Walmart Is Closing 4 Chicago Stores

After reporting about retail theft throughout the United States earlier this week, one finds that Walmart
WMT
is closing four stores according to the Grocery Newsletter. It was only two years ago that Chicago was hailed by Walmart by their advertising that “Walmart believes in Chicago”. Now there will only be four Walmart stores remaining in a city of 8,901,000 people.

Walmart will close the four locations this coming Sunday. They include the neighborhood market in Kenwood, Lakeview and Little Village and one Supercenter on the city’s South Side in the Chatham area. The report also indicted that a health center and a Walmart Academy job training center will be closed. It is part of a program of closing 15 stores this year. However, the three neighborhood markets were not slated to be closed, but stores in Homewood, Plainfield and Lincolnwood are slated to be shuttered.

The Grocery newsletter indicated that the Chatham supercenter is already closed for half a year after it was damaged in the civil unrest followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The stores that are being closed have not been profitable since Walmart opened the first one 17 years ago and the losses have doubled in the last five year. The remaining four stores will continue to operate. In 2020, Walmart’s CEO Dough McMillon said that even though the Chicago stores were losing money, the company remained committed to the city.

As of January 31, 2023 Walmart operated 5,317 retail locations in the U.S. That includes 3,572 Supercenters and 682 Neighborhood Markets. Walmart indicated that associates in the stores slated for closure will be eligible to work in other Chicago stores. Otherwise, they will be paid until August 11, 2023 unless they transfer to another store.

Walmart was trying to help the Chicago stores by building smaller units and selling local farm food and local made products. Recently it spent $70 million to upgrade Chicago stores and to build new health facilities and the training center in Chatham.

POSTSCRIPT: This is the year when managements look critically at the profitable performance of their stores. After the pandemic many neighborhoods have changed character. It means that stores will have to relocate and establish new relationships. One hopes that Walmart will build new stores in the surrounding neighborhoods of Chicago to serve their customers. Under the store leadership of John Fulmer, I expect a strong performance from the domestic Walmart stores.