Walmart To End Overnight Shopping Hours At 40 Stores
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Stocking will continue, but stores will close to customer traffic in those locations to save money.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has announced that it will be ending overnight shopping hours at about 40 of its 24-hour supercenters. The move is an effort to improve cost-efficiency, and the closing will continued to be instituted on a store-by-store basis, the company said, based on store traffic.
More than 20 of stores have already reduced their hours this way. The retailer says that stores that aren’t seeing much activity in the night hours are seeing the closures; stocking and other maintenance and inventory duties will continue to be completed at these stores overnight. Affected employees will be offered different shifts or severance packages.
CEO Doug McMillion has been focused on improving customer experiences while also improving the bottom line at Walmart. This is just one step in the overall improvement process.
In February, McMillon announced that Walmart would be raising employee wages and restructuring, affecting some 500,000 workers. In April, the company announced that it was eliminating the zone manager positions in all of its U.S. stores in an effort to cut bureaucracy and give frontline workers a greater voice. Walmart also announced in April that it was implementing changes aimed at making stores more appealing with fresher foods and faster checkout.
“Based on a recent review of our customers’ shopping patterns,” Walmart spokesman Brian Nick explained, “we have made the decision to adjust hours at some of our stores. This is the kind of decision we make on a store-by-store basis and will allow us the ability to reallocate resources to serve our customers during peak shopping hours.”
And while the move might also reduce theft, loss prevention was not the underlying reason for the decision to end overnight hours, according to Nick.
Edward D. Jones & Co. analyst Brian Yarbrough told Bloomberg that Wal-Mart most likely will end 24-hour shopping nationwide for the most part. “I question if it is a test and could become a national rollout,” Yarbrough said. “There aren’t that many shoppers there overnight. How many people are going to Wal-Mart at 2 in the morning?”
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