News Roundup

Wal-Mart has big plans for Dallas
Retailer chooses site near Park Cities for giant ‘urban’ prototype

The Dallas Morning News
By Steve Brown
April 26, 2002

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, has chosen an in-town Dallas location for the first of a new generation of “urban” discount stores.

The two-story Supercenter will be built on Mockingbird Lane between Inwood Road and Lemmon Avenue, just west of the Park Cities. The 11-acre site is now occupied in part by a Syms outlet store.

Wal-Mart’s closest location to downtown Dallas is its Supercenter on Interstate 30 and Samuell Boulevard. Unlike most discounters that are surrounded by a sea of parking, the store proposed for Mockingbird Lane will front right on the street. All of the parking will be built at ground level under the elevated Supercenter.

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Site of planned store

“We’ve never built a store like this,” said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Daphne Davis Moore. “We’ve had to use specially designed escalators that allow you to take your shopping carts on them.”

Although Wal-Mart stores are common in suburban areas, few of its “big box” retail buildings have been constructed in more congested urban cores.

“In urban areas, it is a challenge to get enough available land” for a Supercenter, usually more than 20 acres, Ms. Moore said. “But we recognize that lots of people live in these urban areas, and more are moving back from the suburbs. We want to be where our customers are.”

Wall Street has been expecting Wal-Mart to move into more densely developed neighborhoods.

“I’m not surprised they are trying this,” said Walter Loeb of Loeb Associates in New York. “I’ve been expecting them to get a lot closer to their customers in the city because more and more, people don’t want to drive as much.”

Residents consulted

Wal-Mart must have zoning changes to build the hybrid store, and the company says it has already started holding meetings with neighborhood groups to “address their concerns.”

Ms. Moore said that adjustments and design changes have been made to the plans at the neighbors’ request, including added landscape and traffic-flow improvements.

“We want to listen to and work with residents to ensure that this store will be a good neighbor,” she said.

The company plans to go before the City Plan Commission in early June to ask for the zoning changes. The block is already zoned for retail and commercial construction. Once the zoning changes are approved, the Syms store will move to a former Wal-Mart site in Plano.

Dallas City Council member Veletta Forsythe Lill, who represents the Love Field area, was unavailable for comment. To fit better in the neighborhood, Wal-Mart is embellishing the exterior of the building with brightly colored awnings, decorative windows, arches and Spanish roof tiles. The site will be heavily landscaped with trees, shrubs and flowerbeds.

“It will give it that storefront look,” Ms. Moore said. “We have used an architecture very similar to Highland Park Village.”

The design, by Middough Associates Inc. of Cleveland, bears little resemblance to the historic Preston Road shopping center.

But it is a radical departure from a traditional Wal-Mart store.

“We are tailoring the store to the location,” said Ms. Moore.

Toward the core

In the early 1990s, Wal-Mart began to build its combination discount and grocery Supercenters closer to larger cities and major metropolitan areas. At the same time, it took its Sam’s Wholesale Clubs into major metropolitan areas.

While Wal-Mart found success along major highways and suburban subdivisions, competitor Target developed stores in both urban and outlying areas. Kmart, traditionally the most urban of the three major discount chains, is reorganizing in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Wal-Mart has taken its Neighborhood Market concept into more urban areas, where it’s harder to find space for a Supercenter.

In a couple of weeks, Wal-Mart is opening its first Neighborhood Market store inside LBJ Freeway in Dallas. The store, at Kingsley and Audelia roads, will be the smallest of the chain’s 31 Neighborhood Markets and the ninth in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Ms. Moore said that besides the planned Love Field Supercenter, she knows of only one other such high-density Wal-Mart in Brazil.

“In Los Angeles, we have a two-story store, but it doesn’t have groceries” and is not as big as the one planned in Dallas, she said.

“When we start construction, it generally takes 10 months,” Ms. Moore said. “This could take a little longer because of the complexity of construction.”

Staff writers Maria Halkias and Katherine Yung contributed to this report.