Woman’s eye-opening video shows how different Walmart looks in the rich neighborhoods

Retail chains like Walmart are known to keep things simple and stock mostly similar products in all of their stores to make it convenient for shoppers. However, one creator on TikTok named Sarah (@reallifesarah918) has sparked an intense discussion by posting a video that claims Walmart stores in affluent areas look much better. The creator claims that the people living in upscale homes get access to aesthetically better-looking stores as well. 

Do Walmart Stores Look Different in Rich Neighborhoods?

In her viral video, Sarah shows what a Walmart store in an affluent area of Arkansas looks like. To provide context, she shows a palatial estate at the beginning and then a picturesque Walmart store at the end. Her overlay text reads, “When your house looks like this,”, referring to the estate, "Your closest Walmart neighborhood market looks like this," referring to the store in Rogers Market. 

While many viewers were amazed by the creator's observation, several wondered if the store looked different from the inside as well. 

Thus, in her follow-up videos, Sarah goes inside different Walmart stores in affluent neighborhoods to see if they are different. While she theorizes that the wealth of the nearby households influenced how the stores look on the outside, she says apart from a few things, the offerings remain largely the same on the inside. However, in one of her videos, Sarah does point out that one thing that is different in the rich neighborhood stores is the beauty section. She shows that the stores in the wealthier neighborhoods have more aisles and options for shoppers. Viewers also pointed out that most stores in other locations had beauty products locked up but the bougie ones did not. 

In another video, Sarah showed that while Walmart locations in most areas were facing a similar baby formula shortage, the ones in rich neighborhoods had the formula and they weren't even locked up. She also showed that the bigger and better stores have a dedicated wellness center which was unheard of for most of the viewers.

When Sarah says the Walmart stores in rich neighborhoods are better, it generally means that they have good customer service, better cleanliness, more products, and shorter checkout times. While there is no strong data to support her claims, there is one small online study that does corroborate them. Back in 2015, Andy Reich, a Columbia University Assistant Professor of Sociology conducted a study in which he analyzed 35,000 Yelp reviews across 2,800 Walmart stores in the U.S. It was found that stores in White and rich neighborhoods had better reviews than the ones in Black and poor neighborhoods. 

“People used words like ‘unorganized’, ‘nasty’ and ‘worst’ to describe stores in communities of color much more than they used those words to describe Walmarts in Whiter communities,” Reich told ABC News in an interview. The professor shared that he used keywords to analyze the reviews which were collected between 2004 and 2015. In their independent survey, news station, WFMY-TV also came across similar observations from customers.  However, in a statement to Business Insider, Walmart expressed that Reich's study was "flawed and without merit."

For more such entertaining content, follow Sarah (@reallifesarah918) on TikTok.