It's an independent shop owner's worst fear: Walmart is coming to town. Or maybe it's Target, or Home Depot, or some other big-box chain moving into your neighborhood. When the word reaches local, independent businesses, it almost always engenders a feeling of impending doom.
And it's getting worse.
In many cases, small retailers fight back by capitalizing on the disdain local consumers often feel for big-box stores invading their neighborhoods. But now, clever chains are coming up with new smaller stores, sometimes with new names not connected with strip malls and parking lots.
Target has recently opened small stores in densely populated urban markets such as Seattle, while Costco Wholesale and Home Depot have shoehorned smaller versions of their stores into Manhattan. For its part, Walmart is opening smaller Neighborhood Market stores, focused on grocery and pharmacy, in both suburbs and downtowns. Walmart continues to tinker with the smaller-store concept it created in 1998, but the company says a typical store is 42,000 square feet. As of November 2010 there were 181 Neighborhood Market stores scattered around the country in markets including Chicago; Memphis, Tennessee; and Boulder, Colorado.
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