By Sarah Nassauer
It has been a while since Walmart felt it was too small.
The retail giant plans to open or expand 150 stores in the U.S. over the next five years, reversing a strategy that had focused on keeping its store count flat. Most stores targeted in the project will be new locations.
Walmart in 2016 began to slow new store openings as it worked to fend off Amazon.com, saying it aimed to invest in online growth, along with improving existing stores. By the end of 2019 that trickle slowed to a near halt as existing real-estate projects wrapped up. It hasn’t opened a new U.S. supercenter in about two years.
In a staff memo sent Wednesday, Walmart said it would open around 12 new stores this year and convert one smaller location to a Walmart Supercenter, the large stores that sell everything from lettuce to vacuums.
Over the next few years Walmart will convert several smaller-format stores to Supercenters, in addition to building new locations.
“We plan to build new stores in a way that we have not done in many years,” said a Walmart spokeswoman. She declined to share the cost of adding and expanding locations or where they will be.
Walmart, which has around 4,700 U.S. locations, reported strong sales growth throughout the pandemic. In recent years stores have become a larger part of the company’s e-commerce supply chain, with staff sourcing online orders from store inventory.
It has also closed stores in urban areas such as Chicago, citing profits that lag behind many of its rural and suburban locations. During the first three quarters of its current fiscal year, Walmart didn’t open a store and closed several.
Some retailers have expanded their footprint in recent years as more people return to in-person shopping following the pandemic and companies use physical stores as part of their e-commerce strategy. Store openings outpaced closures for the second straight year in 2023 after years of net closures, according to research firm Coresight Research.
Walmart said Wednesday it also plans to remodel around 650 of its U.S. locations over the next 12 months. That is on top of upgrades to around 1,400 stores over the last two years, an effort that the company said cost around $9 billion.
Walmart is also working to attract and retain store managers as the company expands its base of locations. The company recently sweetened bonuses for its store managers, promising the best ones annual compensation topping $400,000.
Write to Sarah Nassauer at Sarah.Nassauer@wsj.com