Wal-Mart Stores Inc. — facing growing competition and pivoting to e-commerce sales — will close 269 stores worldwide, including two in Colorado.
The company — the nation’s largest retailer and Colorado’s biggest private employer — says 154 of the stores to be closed are in the United States. The company said about 10,000 of its U.S. workers will be “impacted” by the closures.
Two Colorado stores are slated to close, both in the Neighborhood Market format:
- 8196 West Bowles Ave., Jefferson County (Littleton postal address); closing Sunday.
- 2253 S Monaco Parkway, Denver; closing Jan. 28.
The Arkansas-based company (NYSE: WMT) — which operates the Walmart and Sam’s Cub chains — employs some 25,000 people in Colorado.
“Actively managing our portfolio of assets is essential to maintaining a healthy business,” President and CEO Doug McMillon said in Friday’s announcement. “Closing stores is never an easy decision, but it is necessary to keep the company strong and positioned for the future.”
The company said it considered “financial performance as well as strategic alignment with long-term plans” among other factors in deciding which stores to close. Almost all of the U.S. stores to be shuttered are within 10 miles of another Wal-Mart location.
About two-thirds of the U.S. locations to be closed are Walmart Express stores, the chain’s smallest format.
Wal-Mart has some 11,600 stores around the globe, with 4,500 in the U.S.
….
Nationwide, Wal-Mart still plans to open anywhere from 142 to 165 new U.S. stores in the fiscal year that begins Feb. 1, most of them in its Neighborhood Market format.
“It’s important to remember that we’ll open well more than 300 stores around the world next (fiscal) year,” McMillon said. “So we are committed to growing, but we are being disciplined about it.”
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, & 
‘s 
on 
crosbierealestategroup 