Wal-Mart Plans Supercenters for California

We hear Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of Bentonville has a plan to invade big-box bashing California with Supercenters.

Wal-Mart will build smaller stores with a wall that can later be removed to supersize the store to be a Supercenter.

Traditional Wal-Mart stores tend to be about 100,000 SF in size. Supercenters are about twice that. Wal-Mart has come up with a 99,000-SF store that was introduced in Florida to get under a 100,000-SF ban on big-box retailers.

If Wal-Mart builds the “Urban 99s,” it would already have a toe hold in the land of Arnold and wouldn’t have as much trouble expanding them to Supercenter size later on.

Wal-Mart plans to open 40 Supercenters in California over the next four years, but the world’s largest retailer has been encountering lots of resistance from city governments in that state.

Wal-Mart didn’t return our calls for a comment in time for publication.