Is anyone more familiar with the locale able to provide more context as to why specifically these stores may not be profitable?
Take the 2551 W. Cermak Road location. There's a Costco, Aldi, Target, Marianos, for big name shops, but then there's also at least 11 other smaller local or specialty shops (Betheleham Food Mart, Guzman Grocery, Helens Grocery, etc etc etc).
Walmart just can't complete in big cities. I can find something cheaper and higher quality than Walmart just by walking down the street. Walmart does well in smaller towns where there isn't as much competition, and where they can really push their specialty services. I would never get my eyes examined at a Walmart Eye Center, for instance, since I can find three other places that are closer to me. If you're in a smaller town though those things are super convenient.
I live here- instacart even has the smaller grocery stores now. Why would I ever go to walmart, or use walmart for delivery, when there's so many options that are better on quality and price? Not only that but the niche stores are also really nice.
The only time I go to Walmart is when I'm visiting my in laws in Indiana. There are two other grocery stores there we'll go to for most things, but if we need anything beyond simple grocery stores then Walmart is the only option.
The market in Chicago is different though. Look at Target, which is doing pretty well in Chicago. They don't have four locations, they have at least 22 that I've counted. They've ditched the extras (eye care, pharmacy, etc) and focused on having convenient locations with lower overhead.
But the wage growth + consequences of the "summer of love" when people realized there are no consequences for mass low level property theft happened in 2020... Same with wage growth around the same time with COVID so that doesn't sound like the whole story either.
Your personal anecdotes about local competition in the city and stuff about instacart ignores the massive price/supply advangage that Walmart has, and aren't very persuasive. Typically you'd also see those trends in other urban areas... Why are these 4 stores in Chicago unique? And why 5yrs ago? Are you saying small stores you love + mid tier competitors all suddenly started opening in 2018?
Because otherwise I'd agree that delivery (see: amazon) growth was what killed it but the doubling of losses started happening in 2018. Before COVID.
And there's tons of stats about Walmart's delivery business was booming during COVID.
There has to be some more stuff that happened around then, in combination with these multiple factors.
There were basically better options around it for everything it sold.
Residents preferred nearby Trader Joe’s, Mariano’s, Dom’s, Jewel Osco, and Whole Foods over this Wal-Mart.
I'm just amazed they aren't closing the thunderdome Walmart that is off of North ave.
I'm not talking like, take some merchandise to the restroom, remove the security packaging, leave it in the stall, and walk out with the stuff under your sweatshirt. I'm talking like, just walking out of the store with plural heaping cartfuls of large quantities of food, valued at several hundreds of dollars per cart. and there was nothing we could do about it. I almost got fired for trying to stop a guy from stealing stuff one night, and I really should have been, according to policy, as we got in a fistfight and he almost domed me with a maglite.
obviously, even as a then-employee, I didn't give a single shit about Walmart as a corporation, its bottom line, or anything like that—obviously I knew all about the concept of "shrinkage" at that point. but what actually concerns me is this general degradation of societal trust and cohesion we're experiencing, even here in my hometown of ~76,000 people.
when my mom went to school at the same high school I later attended, kids would leave their hunting rifles and shotguns in gun racks in the back of their pickup trucks in the school parking lot, and nobody gave a shit. the year I was born, someone brought a sawed-off to that high school and held up a classroom. (nobody ended up hurt or killed.) when I was a senior in high school, a kid got a felony for leaving a paintball gun in the (locked) backseat of his sedan from a weekend excursion to the woods, in the parking lot of the high school across town, while all schools in the district, including mine, were put into lockdown for about an hour.
I'm not sure where we went wrong, or even what exactly is happening in general, but it's clear that times used to be better with regards to societal trust and cohesion, both here and just about everywhere, and it only seems like things continue to get worse over time.
Really feels like we need a massive exercise wherein folks have to repeat back what they heard someone say before responding to it, something they have people do in couples therapy.
In the last few years everyone's filters have gotten to the point where it seems like they really cannot even perceive what others say accurately -- literally substituting words -- and continually reframing arguments to the extent that a good portion of fighting online is over things nobody has said.
I mean heck even in the comments on this article, someone mentioned at the end of another comment that they thought this article was "irrelevant" which given this is ostensibly a tech news site that sounded fair (but also: so what?), and the person arguing back said they were "not our arbiter of acceptable content". Relevant... acceptable. The conceptual rift is massive, leaving the second person arguing against a point which has not been made (and then someone else makes a defense of the misconstrued point and so on and so on).
We've had shop closures blamed on shoplifting in the past that turned out to be due to something else.