What’s eating Gilbert, Arizona? It’s not going to be Wal-Mart. On January 5, 2008, Sprawl-Busters wrote that Wal-Mart’s plans for a superstore in Gilbert was hung out to dry in the Arizona winds. Gilbert already has 20 Wal-Mart stores within 13 miles, including a Wal-Mart supercenter on South Power Road in Gilbert, and another supercenter on South Market Street in East Gilbert. There are also supercenters in Mesa (7) and Chandler (2), and several other neighboring communities. In fact, Gilbert shoppers have 13 Wal-Mart supercenters within 13 miles. So the cancellation of a Wal-Mart supercenter is no super loss. All this sprawl is a response to the meteoric population rise in the area. In 1990, Gilbert was a sleepy community with only 29,188 people. But by 2006, developers had turned Gilbert into a community with a 6.5 fold population explosion of 191,517 people. The Arizona Republic reported in early January that Wal-Mart’s plans for a “small” supercenter in the Gilbert “Town Square” project had been put on the shelf — for now. “We do own that land but we don’t have a timeline for developing it yet,” a company spokeswoman told the Republic. “We’re still interested in developing the property and we’re still interested in serving that part of Gilbert.” Three years ago, Wal-Mart announced that it was going to build this “mini-Supercenter” along Warner Road. The superstore would have been around 100,000 s.f., would have “a slightly smaller product selection than a regular Supercenter” according to the newspaper. Wal-Mart said it would watch the market and decide when to move forward. Some Gilbert residents hoped that meant never. The other superstore shoe dropped this week, when the newspaper announced that Wal-Mart was completely abandoning its plans for Gilbert Town Square. A company spokesperson said the Gilbert store no longer fit the retailer’s growth strategy. Now the company has to sell the site.
Never let anyone tell you that because Wal-Mart has bought some land, that it’s too late to stop it. The Gilbert case illustrates the fact that who owns the land is irrelevant. Wal-Mart punts on another site, and leaves many residents in Gilbert pleased and delighted. One Republic reader commented on this pullout: “Anything is better than Wal-Mart. This is right behind my house and I couldn’t be happier. I rarely go into a Wal-Mart and feel like I have to take a shower every time I leave.” Four years of work on Wal-Mart’s part ends with a piece of land in need of a real estate agent. Another aborted project, and another indicator that Wal-Mart’s growth plans were far too ambitious. Gilbert is feeling the impact of the business decision that Wal-Mart abruptly tossed out at its annual shareholders meeting in Fayetteville, Arkansas last June. The company announced that it was curtailing its new store growth. That decision was described by Sprawl-Busters as a major victory for anti-Wal-Mart citizen’s groups around the country, who have made permitting of a Wal-Mart a time-consuming and costly proposition. Permit approval is no longer a foregone conclusion. When Wal-Mart announced that it was slowing down the pace of new store expansion, Wall Street analysts applauded, because the retailer had been eating into its own same store sales by locating superstores so tightly-packed together. On the one-hand, Wal-Mart officials were saying they could easily build another 4,000 supercenters in America, but on the other hand, they were postponing the construction of 80 stores from 2007 into 2008. Shareholders at the annual meeting were holding in their laps an annual report that said nothing about curtailing new store growth, so the plan was obviously formulated after the Annual Report went to the printers. The policy switch showed that Wal-Mart had miscalculated its growth path, and that its sales performance required a more modest growth strategy. It was also a sign that local opposition had tied up many of the retailer’s proposals in red tape. This was sweet music to the ears of local citizen’s groups across the country. And it is the reason that people on Warner Road in Gilbert will not be living with a Wal-Mart mini-supercenter. This pause in the action gives readers an excellent opportunity to call or email Gilbert Mayor Steve Berman at (480) 503-6860 (email: [email protected]) with the following message: “Mayor Berman, Now that Wal-Mart left Gilbert at the altar by running out on its Warner Road site, isn’t it a good time for Gilbert to put a cap on the size of retail buildings? You have no less than 13 supercenters within 13 miles of Gilbert. Surely there is more to ‘quality of life’ in Gilbert than big box shopping! You can put a stop to this environmentally wasteful over-building with one sentence, limiting the size of retail stores to 75,000 s.f. Do it now, before some other chain store picks on Gilbert.”
