The Walmart Supercenter at 13739 N. Central Expressway just north of I-635 on the west frontage road will close March 30.
The 200 employees will be able to transfer to three Walmart Supercenters and one Neighborhood Market that are located within 5 miles of the store while it’s under construction, said Walmart spokesman Charles Crowson. Employees who want to return to the I-635 location will be trained to work in a fulfillment center when it reopens in spring 2022.
Both general merchandise and grocery orders will be filled from the building. Customers will be able to pick up orders, but the store will no longer be open for in-store shopping, he said. The new set-up will take some pressure off surrounding stores that will also continue to fill online orders.
Walmart has 170 Supercenters, Neighborhood Markets and Sam’s Clubs in Dallas-Fort Worth, which is its largest single market.
The decision to convert the store in a densely populated area of North Dallas and convenient to major highways is a response to new shopping patterns and based on market research, Crowson said. “We don’t shop the same way we used to up and down the aisles.”
Walmart, which owns the North Dallas store and most of its buildings, has converted stores to e-commerce operations before.
When Sam’s Club closed 63 stores in the U.S. in 2018, the company converted a dozen of them into fulfillment centers. And in 2017, Walmart opened a building in Bentonville, Ark., where it’s headquartered, that is dedicated to delivering orders. It also fills pickup order for nearby stores and takes them to the locations that customers select.
The world’s largest retailer said in January that it was going to begin using its store space differently to keep up with online shopping demand from customers. Walmart said that it would carve out sections of dozens of stores to build automated local fulfillment centers to speed up online orders. Two local stores are part of that program so far: at 8801 Ohio Drive in Plano and 190 E. Round Grove Road in Lewisville.
The trend of using stores as fulfillment centers is not new, and retailers have been saying in recent years that their stores are convenient to customers and are an important part of their online shopping operations.
But more retailers are beginning to try it a different way by closing some stores and using them strictly to fill online orders. Best Buy and Macy’s have closed stores to the public and reopened them as online fulfillment centers. Nordstrom has built small shops it calls Nordstrom Studios for e-commerce and some services such as alterations.
The North Dallas store that’s being converted opened in 1995, just as Walmart was beginning to move into the Dallas city limits from the suburbs. It was closed once in 2008 when another store opened on Forest Lane and reopened in 2012.
