Elgin Area Chamber Of Commerce: Walmart's Battle With Amazon Plays Out In This 1 Million-Square-Foot Building

Elgin IL

26 January, 2022

2:31 AM

Description

Press release from the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce: January 25, 2022 Retailer Walmart plans to open a sprawling fulfillment center in northern Mississippi as part of the company's strategy to challenge Amazon's e-commerce supremacy. The company is finishing a distribution building in Olive Branch that measures more than 1 million square feet that Dallas-based developer Hillwood completed last November. It's about 25 miles from the heart of Memphis, Tennessee, and is Walmart's first fulfillment center in the area. Walmart expects to open the operation in the spring. "The new facility will store millions of items from Walmart's everyday low-priced merchandise, which will be ready to be shipped directly to customers with the great speed that they expect," Steve Miller, Walmart's senior vice president of supply chain operations, said in a statement. Walmart, the largest brick-and-mortar retailer in the United States, last year began spending heavily on expanding its supply network to speed up e-commerce deliveries. Like many retailers, Walmart has seen e-commerce sales surge during the pandemic. The company reported in its quarter that ended Oct. 29 that e-commerce sales rose 8% from the previous year and were 87% higher since the same quarter in 2019. Walmart projected then that its total capital investment would reach $13 billion for 2021, higher than in previous years as it expands the company's supply chain. In December, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company announced it would build a 1 million-square-foot e-commerce fulfillment center in Salt Lake City. The large fulfillment center is its first in Utah, where it operates three distribution centers and 59 stores. It's scheduled to open in August. Walmart also has three distribution centers in Mississippi and 86 stores throughout the Magnolia State. Meanwhile, Amazon, the biggest online retailer in the United States, has been building large fulfillment centers across the country for years, accelerating the pace during the pandemic to meet higher customer demand. The Seattle-based company is also dipping its toe into brick-and-mortar fashion retail with plans for a 30,000-square-foot apparel store, Amazon Style, at a Southern California shopping mall. Source: www.CoStar.com This press release was produced by the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce. The views expressed here are the author's own.