Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market Coming to East Fayetteville in 1999

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. wants to build one of its “Neighborhood Market” stores in Fayetteville.

Plans for the 40,000-SF stores in Bentonville, Springdale and Sherwood have already been reported by the Business Journal. Wal-Mart also plans to build one of the Neighborhood Markets in Fort Smith.

Wal-Mart recently filed elevation drawings with the Fayette-

ville Planning Commission to build one of the stores at Kantz Place, a 15-acre development proposed near Arkansas Highway 265 (Crossover Road) and Arkansas Highway 45 (Mission Boulevard).

The 41,164-SF store will be part of an L-shaped shopping center that will contain 98,000-SF of retail space, says Chris Parton, an engineer intern with Crafton, Tull & Associates, a Rogers firm that is serving as site engineer.

Representatives of Crafton, Tull met with the Planning Commission’s technical plat review committee July 29. They go before the subdivision committee on Aug. 13, and, if all goes well, before the full Planning Commission on Aug. 24.

If everything is approved, construction could begin in late September and the shopping center could be completed by early next year, says Parton.

The property at Kantz Place is owned by E.J. Ball, a Fay-

etteville lawyer.

Wal-Mart has been characteristically secretive about the smaller stores. At Wal-Mart’s annual shareholders’ meeting last June, CEO David Glass referred to them as an “experiment” that had received more media attention than they deserved.

“It’s a retail unit that will have general merchandise and food,” says Les Copeland, a spokesman for Wal-Mart. “It’s an experiment. Really, what it’s going to be for us is a laboratory. It’s a place for our merchants in the local area to try some new things.”

The stores also feature drive-through pharmacies.

At the May 3 meeting of the Springdale Planning Commission, CEI Engineering Associates Inc. of Bentonville proposed a 40,257-SF retail center for Wal-Mart on U.S. Highway 412 between Carley Road and Johnson Road.

In Bentonville, a 41,000-SF Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market is planned on Arkansas Highway 102. Construction is expected to begin this spring. The stores are somewhat small for Wal-Mart these days. Superstores being built by the company are about 200,000 SF in size.

Asma Usmani, a retail analyst with Edward D. Jones & Co. in St. Louis, says the Neighborhood Markets may be in response to the success of Dollar General Corp., which has carved into Wal-Mart’s market with 3,100 small stores nationwide and a 5.4 percent net margin (net income divided by sales) for 1997. That compares with 3 percent for Wal-Mart. For the past five years, Dollar General’s stock has delivered a 44.7 percent average annual return, more than any other retail company.

The Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets will be more convenient than supercenters and carry a “fine-tuned” line of consumables, says Usmani.