Walmart opened its first small convenience store in Chicago yesterday amid hopes of finally cracking the urban US market, Reuters reports.The new Walmart Express store is located in the city's Chatham neighborhood, and is less than one-tenth the size of a traditional Walmart supercentre. Walmart plans to open four more Express outlets in Chicago, as well as three larger stores and two more supercentres.
"I think it's fair to say there's a multibillion dollar growth opportunity in a lot of these cities and Walmart just hasn't had the right format to penetrate," Natalie Berg, global research director at Planet Retail, told the news agency. "If they can't get the store economics right then the format really doesn't have a future. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on keeping costs down."
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