Business is slow at the Wal-Mart in Cheboygan, Wisconsin. So slow, the local manager is cutting back open hours by 33% less than a year after opening. The Wal-Mart supercenter may have thought that just six weeks after Carter’s Food Center Plus closed, that they would pick up more buisness. But now Wal-Mart has announced its will close the entire store, grocery and discount sections, at 11 pm, and not reopen until 7 am. “It’s just lack of business at night in the wintertime, it’s really dead,” store Manager Brent Emerick told the newspaper. “It’s possible that it might become a permanent thing into the summer, too, but right now it isn’t cost-effective for us to stay open all night. Some of the stores in smaller towns are now closing at 11 p.m. They’re kind of realizing that they’re not going to do the business to justify keeping them open all night. The bigger towns downstate still have 24-hour service.” The Daily Tribune also noted that, “Besides serving fewer customers, retail stores also face security concerns in 24-hour operations and usually report higher theft rates during the overnight hours.” The Carter’s Food Store shut down within one year of Wal-Mart opening its supercenter, another grocery casualty.
Wal-Mart doesn’t like to mention stores cutting back their hours because “its dead” around here. But employees at Wal-Mart are more fortunate than those at Carters, who lost their jobs. The Tribune reported that several workers at Carters found work at Wal-Mart, the company that croaked their jobs.
