The article points out that in 95% of cases, there's another Walmart within 10 miles of the one they're closing. It seems like the Post is choosing the most ex

The article points out that in 95% of cases, there's another Walmart within 10 miles of the one they're closing. It seems like the Post is choosing the most extreme case it could find. The article also points out that the town had already shut down before Walmart had come in. But it still seems to take the angry-corporate-greed angle. This wasn't a place where Walmart came in and displaced businesses. This is where Walmart came in where there had been nothing. People always like to play the "there's no way this isn't making money" card like companies like to close things that make money. The article also doesn't really talk about how most of the closures are really Walmart Express stores. If BestBuy decided to end BestBuy Mobile, it's more a decision about the format than locations. Walmart is closing 12 Supercenters and 6 regular Walmarts. The other closings are other formats. For example, Walmart is killing off their Express stores which number 102. The second most closings is for the Neighborhood Markets which (from the map) are in urban areas where people will have other options. From a PR perspective, Walmart should have announced that it was killing off the Express concept independent of any other closings. Close those now. Then, over the next 18 months, close a single Walmart each month. Saying that you don't like the Express concept is just a business direction. Closing a Walmart each month isn't national news. And just trudge along with some of the rest. By closing 154 all at once, it becomes news and it becomes "Walmarts" that are being closed when the vast majority are Walmart Express stores that were an experiment started in 2011. The majority of the locations being closed are an experiment where Walmart tried to create a CVS-sized store. It's going to be crappy for a few places. But to be fair to Walmart, the residents of Kimball say that all the other shops had left before Walmart even came in. Big numbers make for news and Walmart should have been smarter and shuttered the Express stores independent of any real Walmart closings. If they had shuttered 102 Express locations and then just closed a Walmart here and there, people wouldn't make news out of it because it wouldn't be big numbers. There would be news about how Walmart can't do smaller-format stores, but that's a very different story from the Post article. The real story here is that Walmart didn't manage the closings in a PR-friendly way.