Walmart is opening new stores for wealthy urban customers — but there's a major catch
Most people think of retail chains as places where people can find quality products for discounted prices. But now affluent Americans are showing a rising interest in shopping at Walmart. According to a report in Investopedia, those with six-figure incomes have flocked to the store digitally as the company built its delivery operation. As a result, the people who run Walmart want to serve such people by making sure that their deliveries get to them as early as possible. The best way to do it is to open up stores in parts of the city where rich people reside.
Executives have credited a lot of the company’s recent growth to affluent people, who have taken full advantage of the delivery operation. To serve them better, Walmart is considering opening dark stores, in which no customers would be allowed. These stores would simply have the products ready to be delivered whenever necessary. It makes sense as this is the population that prefers the company’s delivery option.
"Certainly, with a more affluent customer base that's coming to Walmart now, there's an opportunity to serve [them] in maybe more of a dark store format, where you don't have customers going into stores, but we can serve them through eCommerce," CFO John David Rainey said at a conference on Tuesday. "We're experimenting with that, and the early returns are encouraging," he added. The fact that affluent customers have been shopping at Walmart of late can be proven by their Black Friday numbers.
The top-selling product was AirPods, which is something people with a higher income can normally afford. "One of the top-selling items was AirPods, which ... maybe is more attractive to the more affluent customer," Rainey said at the conference, before explaining, "It's indicative of how Walmart is changing, and how our customer base is changing."
It turns out that these dark stores have been operating for quite some time now. A USA Today report dated June talks about how such stores have been opened to fulfil online needs. They’re usually packed with the most popular items that are ordered online. The report also states that an insider revealed to the publication that there was no signage inside the store, as it was never expecting any customers.
The first of these dark stores was opened in Dallas, and it resembled a regular Walmart store. At the time, another dark store was in the works for Bentonville, Arkansas, the home of the retailer's corporate headquarters. "We regularly test new tools, features, and capabilities to better connect with and serve our customers – wherever and however they choose to shop," Walmart had said in a statement. "Regardless of the channel, our goal remains the same: to deliver a fast, seamless, and engaging customer experience," it added.
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