Wal-Mart will open its first L.A.-area Supercenters store in Santa Clarita on Jan. 31. The 216,000-square-foot store, which is located off Bouquet Canyon Road near Valencia Boulevard on Carl Boyer Drive, will be the closest Wal-Mart Supercenters to the city of Los Angeles, where the retailer has had difficulty garnering community and city support for its larger format stores. “We’re continuing to try to serve the San Fernando Valley as best we can,” said Kevin McCall, a community affairs official for Wal-Mart’s Southern California region. “With the addition of the Santa Clarita Supercenters, which will provide traditional (selections) and a full range of groceries, we believe we can further serve residents of San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valley.” Wal-Mart’s growth most recently has been focused on its Supercenters, with the vast majority of its new store openings in fiscal 2006 devoted to that format. The company said that it plans to open 270 to 280 Supercenters in 2006, compared to 20 to 30 discount stores, Wal-Mart’s traditional format. But while the retailer has made significant inroads in the L.A. area with its discount stores, plans to open Supercenters have met with fierce opposition by communities, who worry that the stores, primarily because of their grocery component, will kill competition in the area and could potentially, drive out better-paying union jobs at other grocers. The company currently operates about 10 Supercenters across California, compared with about 150 discount stores in the state. Wal-Mart earlier this month dropped plans to build a discount store in Northridge after neighbors fought for and won a requirement that the company develop a full environmental impact report for the project. Although the store was not expected to have a grocery component, the community worried that the location did not offer sufficient access and egress and would create severe traffic problems in the area. Wal-Mart has faced even more challenging location difficulties with its larger Supercenters format as it tries to move into urban areas. Company officials said the retailer has been exploring a variety of design and layout changes to better suit the more dense populations it is hoping to serve. In some cases, the company has been building multi-level stores and in other areas Wal-Mart has explored building underground parking structures. A Supercenters recently completed in North Miami Beach is a multilevel unit adjacent to a power center, instead of the freestanding format the company has favored in less populated areas. As for its scrapped Northridge location, Wal-Mart officials said they had no objection to an environmental impact report, just the time it would take to complete. “The location for us isn’t an option and so we’re looking at what our options are,” said McCall. “We’ll know more in the future.”
