Waiting for Wal-Mart to arrive is like waiting for a new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. The hype says it will be bigger and better than anything we’ve seen before, and that the American philosophy of good ol’ rock-bottom prices and everything under one roof will kick the British retail industry’s ass.
Well, it’s here now, in the form of the Asda Wal-Mart Supercentre, a refurbished store at the Cribbs Causeway shopping mall outside Bristol. And it’s about to be followed by a new-build super-shed now on site at Havant, near Portsmouth. So are we on the threshold of a whole new shopping experience? I went to Bristol to find out.
The Wal-Mart philosophy is not a million miles from Asda’s own, of course. Long before the US giant – turnover £85bn – snapped it up for £6.72bn last year, Asda was experimenting with extending its range of merchandise and operating stores twice the size of its rivals. I asked Asda’s property manager, Brian Rutherford, if
Wal-Mart was pushing its ways of buying buildings and selling things in them on to its new subsidiary.
“It’s rather the other way around, with them learning from us,” he said. Rutherford explained that the Wal-Mart culture is about building near-identical “cookie cutter” sheds all over the States at a rate of 200 a year. “Over there, land is very cheap and planners barely exist, so it can erect buildings with identical footprints wherever it likes and it’s not too much of a problem if it gets the catchment forecasts wrong,” says Rutherford.
In the States, Wal-Mart block-buys all its materials and then contracts local firms to put the stores together. “Like hiring a carpenter to assemble a giant Ikea flatpack,” I suggest.
“Exactly. The trouble is that, when they start moving into the more sophisticated East and West Coast cities, life becomes more complicated. They hit planning problems and local amenity societies, and the plots are much more expensive and irregularly shaped, particularly if they are brownfield. Asda has had to address these problems for 15 years, so the Wal-Mart guys are lapping up our expertise,” says Rutherford.
At the Bristol store, everything is under exactly the same roof as the Asda that previously operated there. When built in 1979 as a 16 700 m2 Carrefour hypermarket, the store was then the biggest ever built in Britain. At that time, it was the French who were going to show this nation of shopkeepers how it’s done.
All the Yanks appear to have done in Bristol is reorganise some of the space so that the all-important sales area could be expanded into the staff quarters and warehousing. This can be seen quite clearly in the sections for alcohol, toys and electrical goods at the back of the store, where the floor-to-ceiling height is half that of the rest of the store. An external ramp at the back of the store provides access to the condensed and spartan staff areas, which occupy a newly inserted floor above the sales area.
Otherwise, it is the basic Asda shell: whitish vinyl flooring, everything above 3 m painted white and all the ducting, structure, light gantries and pneumatic tubes on show.
The original profiled cladding has been replaced by smarter ribbed cladding on three sides; Wal-Mart decided simply to paint the fourth side white when it took over. This white cladding aesthetic is accompanied by steel members that hold up glass canopies to protect shoppers from the weather. This is all fairly decent and nothing to get excited about.
A new restaurant has been converted out of former warehousing at one end of the retail area, and this is nothing to get excited about, either. It does not seem to operate very efficiently, has precious little style and looks like the sort of motorway service station we have been trying to get away from since the 1970s. In the States, diners can still bask in all the glory of the chrome, the deco styling, the soda fountains, the piles of delicious fresh waffles and the extreme efficiency of the service in 1950s Grease-style eateries. At Bristol, customers sit among piled-up chip and burger detritus, surrounded by gigantic colour photographs of baked beans and fried eggs tacked to the walls as if to offer customers a point-and-buy service.
There are some novelties, such as helpers on scooters and prominent “happy to help” badges. When it comes to Wal-Mart’s unique selling point, though – the ability to buy everything from Corn Flakes to computers in the same place – we probably need a little more time to get used to it. People enjoy going to different places to buy different things. When you have a last-minute panic at your weekly date with the checkout, it is usually “Oh God, we’ve forgotten the Brillo Pads”, not “Oh God, we’ve forgotten to get a 23-inch Nicam stereo digital colour television.”
The next bridgehead in Wal-Mart’s invasion of Britain is under construction by Kajima in the car park of a former Co-op store in Havant. The Co-op will be demolished after the new store opens in 10 weeks’ time.
Peter Allchurch of architect HGP Greentree Allchurch Evans, which has been on Asda’s partnering team for five years, says: “There’s greater focus on value for money, with standardised window modules and more use of cladding instead of brickwork. But for Asda, this is no big leap forward.”
So, even Wal-Mart’s first new-build store in the UK does not sound such a big deal. If this is Schwarzenegger development, it’s very tame Schwarzenegger.
