National discount retailer Wal-Mart is so interested in opening a store
in New York City, and specifically Brooklyn, they’re willing to change
their big-box-store image, executives said at a June 30 meeting with Brooklyn
reporters.
Company executives and their public relations representatives met reporters
at the New York Marriott Brooklyn on Adams Street not to announce a specific
New York City site — although they conceded that their local press
outreach had not extended beyond Brooklyn — but to discuss what an
urban Wal-Mart might look like, and what competitors have taught them
about this borough’s “urban market.”
“Each project is different,” said Mia Masten, Wal-Mart’s
communications director.
“If we can’t have it on a single story, we can do a tiered structure,”
she said. “There isn’t an urban prototype per se, but it would
have to be feasible for an urban market.”
After a deal to build a Wal-Mart in Rego Park, Queens, fell through earlier
this year the company began eyeing Brooklyn, among other locations in
the city.
“Population alone is huge; we know that there are other retailers
doing well here,” said Masten. “We also know that Brooklynites
want a Wal-Mart,” she said, citing a study commissioned by the Marino
Organization, the public relations firm representing the company. That
study claims that 67 percent of Brooklynites would support the opening
of a Wal-Mart in the borough. The survey interviewed 240 Brooklynites
by telephone on Feb. 28 and March 1 of this year.
As part of the company’s efforts to soften its image in the face
of criticism, largely from labor unions, of its wage structure and other
employment practices, Wal-Mart has adopted appearances that are aesthetically
suitable to their environment, Masten said.
“We’ve gone past the old ‘battleship blue’ style,
and now accommodate nationwide,” said Masten. “Say, if it’s
going to be in a rural setting, we’ll do like a mountain resort with
an Adirondack look to it. In Main Street, it will appear more industrial,”
she said, and pointed towards an in-process renovation in White Plains,
N.Y., where a Wal-Mart is being developed in a former Sears department
store building.
“In the California area we’re now doing Spanish-style —
we’re trying to modify the architecture so the site reflects the
other scenes around it.”
Would a Brooklynized Wal-Mart be in the shell of a couple of brownstones?
“Yeah, to the extent we could find the space, yeah, I think that
could work,” Masten agreed.
Rumors circulated last December, just after Wal-Mart announced plans to
open in Rego Park, that the company was also eyeing a spot on Flatbush
Avenue Extension near the Gallery at Fulton Mall shopping center. Officials
said at the time that this was not a potential location, and the Marino
Organization’s Lee Silberstein, a spokesman for Joseph Sitt, the
current property owner there, agreed.
Instead, what would really hit the spot for the company is to have their
fiercest competitor in their sights.
Target, which last year opened in the Atlantic Terminal mall, at Atlantic
and Flatbush avenues, has been a huge success — reportedly the best
first-year seen by the company, according to Crain’s New York Business.
Crain’s also reported that the two-level store — which sits
over a hub of 11 subway lines and the Long Island Rail Road —is the
eighth most successful Target in the country. The 192,000-square-foot
store includes a pharmacy, and carries a range of goods from aspirin and
appliances to groceries and cheap-chic apparel.
Target has 1,330 stores in 47 states, and Wal-Mart boasts 5,233 stores
worldwide, including Supercenters (which have supermarkets, as well),
Sam’s Club bulk stores, and smaller neighborhood or “general
merchandise” stores.
Masten said Wal-Mart already spends roughly $100 million a year buying
merchandise from Brooklyn venders — “everything from candles
to clothing to dolls to foodstuff,” and could tailor what the store
carries to meet the population’s needs, including not selling guns
or rifles.
“It depends on the community,” she said. “In New Haven,
the police chief and clergy met with officials and asked them not to sell
firearms. So we agreed.”
The Wal-Mart executives were mum, at the June 30 sit-down with reporters,
on where, specifically, the company was looking, but all but ruled out
rumors that Red Hook was a prime location for the typically big-box stores
of 134,000-square-feet on one floor.
Ikea is building a 346,000-square-foot store on a 22-acre former New York
Shipyard site between Dwight and Columbia Streets along the Erie Basin
in Red Hook.
“I think there was a lot of attention there last year,” said
Masten. “Red Hook came up really strong last year, and we never had
taken a look at any specific sites in Red Hook. Right now we’re not
looking there.”
Phil Serghini, Wal-Mart’s Northeast community affairs manager, added,
“When we look at a piece of land we look at particulars such as subway
transportation,” he said.
When asked by The Brooklyn Papers, both he and Masten agreed that a site
near or within the Atlantic Terminal mall and Atlantic Avenue subway station
might be considered.
“There are many situations where we are right across the street from
a direct competitor,” said Masten of the Target site. “In many
of our competitive districts its not uncommon to see a Target, a Lowe’s,
a Wal-Mart and a Kohl’s across the street from each other —
and they all do well.
“It’s one of those things, obviously, people are coming,”
she said of those other large chain stores, “and they’re coming
in droves.
“We want some of the market share.”
