LONGVIEW, Texas – Walmart announced plans to rollout its smaller Express format in several towns across East Texas: Naples, Tatum and Lone Star, reports the Longview News-Journal.
The Arkansas-based retailer introduced the Walmart Express format in 2011. The stores are generally 15,000 square feet and sell mostly groceries, general merchandise and, in some locations, gasoline.
Plans to expand into East Texas have been met with mixed reviews, notes the newspaper.
“I’m not against any business,” commented Naples Mayor Danny Mills. “I want to see this town grow more eventually, but at the time it’s really got the people kind of stirred up, and I don’t know whether it will wind up good or bad.”
Mills said the new Walmart Express will be about 11,000 square feet and open sometime this year. He said that he reached out to the retailer several years ago asking it to build a store, but was told Naples is too small at 1,400 residents. At that time, the town was lacking a grocery store. Since then, Oklahoma-based Pruett’s Food opened a $1.5-million store. Mills said the store had just opened when Walmart announced it was going to try and open up an Express format in his town.
“This is going to be an interesting situation,” Mills told the newspaper, saying he would hate to see it hurt Pruett’s business. He’s uncertain what products the store plans to offer, but knows it will have fuel pumps and “offer convenience-store type items.”
The town of Lone Star, with 1,600 residents is looking forward to an approximately 12,000-square-foot Walmart Express store that will sell groceries and fuel, and possibly pharmacy, which the town currently lacks.
“We’re excited,” City Secretary Ruth Nash told the newspaper. “We have a small grocery store in town,” she continued, noting that the Walmart Express could compete with it. “But that’s what capitalism is all about. We’re just such a small little town that the new jobs that would be coming to staff the store and the additional sales tax revenue and property tax revenue — we think it will draw enough business into our town that it will more than offset what might happen to the other stores.”
In Tatum, Mayor Phil Cory said plans for the new Walmart Express are still in preliminary stages. “From a community standpoint, I’ve always believed competition is good at least,” he told the newspaper, adding that he hasn’t had any direct feedback from the community.