TULALIP — The first Wal-Mart Supercenter in Snohomish County will open next spring, bringing new competition to the region’s grocery stores.
Construction crews have begun digging up ground on the north side of the existing Wal-Mart in Quil-Ceda Village west of Marysville to make way for a nearly 77,000-square-foot addition to the store. The added space will allow the store to carry a full range of grocery items, in addition to the merchandise it already sells.
John McCoy, general manager of Quil Ceda Village, said the bigger store should be open after mid-April of next year.
When finished, the Supercenter will encompass more than 226,000 square feet. It will be the one of the closest such stores to the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett area; the next closest are in Shelton and Chehalis, according to Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.
Across the nation, there are 1,397 Supercenters, with 11 of those bigger stores in Washington state, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman said. The bigger stores each employ an average of 350 people.
The Supercenter at Quil Ceda Village will be relatively large, as the Supercenter stores are usually no bigger than 230,000 square feet, according to Wal-Mart.
Choosing to make the store the region’s first Supercenter makes sense, as McCoy said he’s been told the existing store has become Wal-Mart’s top performer in the state since opening in 2001.
Since opening its first Supercenter store in the late 1980s, Wal-Mart has become the nation’s largest grocer, capturing a nearly 20-percent share of that market. Its success has come through bringing its competitive pricing in general merchandise to groceries. The chain has the advantage of a lower-paid, nonunionized work force, while most of the major supermarket chains have unionized workers.
"That’s definitely a major concern in the Puget Sound area, especially because our work force is very heavily unionized," said Amy Brackenbury, vice president of Washington Food Industry, an association representing grocery stores and wholesalers across the state. She said member stores in Centralia have reported a "real dramatic impact" in sales since the Wal-Mart Supercenter opened there.
Bert Hambleton, a consumer researcher and president of Hambleton Resources Inc. in Issaquah, said Wal-Mart previously was limited by its distribution network from offering groceries in the Puget Sound market. With the construction of a new food distribution center in central Washington, however, the world’s biggest retailer can compete in the grocery sector.
The arrival of Wal-Mart Supercenters to the region obviously will have an effect on the numerous other retailers already competing for shoppers.
"You’re bringing in a new competitor and nobody’s volunteering to go away. It’s going to get very crowded very fast," Hambleton said.
In markets where Wal-Mart already holds a major share of the grocery market, many competitors have found the way to survive is not to compete on price, but to offer distinguishing products or services. That is likely to happen in this area as well, he said.
The Tulalip Tribes certainly are expecting the expansion to bring Wal-Mart more business. McCoy said officials already to considering what adjustments they can make to deal with more traffic in and out of Quil Ceda Village.
Reporter Eric Fetters: 425-339-3453 or fetters@heraldnet.com.
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