Cleveland, OH. Wal-Mart Poised to Change Local Business

Clevelanders await Wal-Mart Supercenter’s opening with anticipation, anxiety [Cleveland Plain Dealer (Ohio)]

Big-box retailing in Cleveland is about to get much, much bigger.

As of 8 a.m. Wednesday, when a Wal-Mart Supercenter opens for business at Steelyard Commons, the city will have 217,000 more square feet of retail space than it does today.

That’s nearly 90,000 square feet more than either Target or Home Depot, the two big-box stores now reigning over Steelyard.

Many in Cleveland are eager to embrace that expanded reality, believing Wal-Mart’s presence inside the city limits is overdue. But not everyone is thrilled by the chain’s arrival.

“It’s kind of a trade-off,” said James Kastelic, a senior planner with the Cleveland Metroparks who has tracked the city’s retail environment for years. “You want it, but you’re concerned about it.”

First off, here’s what all that new square footage entails:

Like each of the 4,300 Wal-Mart stores nationwide, the Steelyard location carries a wide array of discounted apparel, jewelry, health and beauty supplies, electronics, toys and household goods.

But like 104 other Wal-Marts in Ohio, this one is also a Supercenter featuring a full grocery store with produce (organic included), meat, dairy and frozen foods, as well as hair and nail salons, a tire and oil-change center, photo lab, drive-through pharmacy and a bank branch.

Additionally, this location also features a MoneyCenter, one of Wal-Mart’s newer services, where customers can pay bills, cash checks, buy pre-paid debit cards and send moneygrams.

Ron Mosby, Wal-Mart’s senior manager for public affairs in Ohio, said Supercenters are now the company’s focus.

“We’ve found that the Supercenter concept is the one that provides customers the greatest response to their needs. . . . By having a Supercenter, [customers] literally only have to make one trip.”

The Steelyard Commons store is a first on two accounts: It’s the first Wal-Mart in Cleveland and the first Supercenter in Cuyahoga County.

Outside Steelyard, there are two Supercenters in Northeast Ohio, in Elyria and Oberlin. A fourth is slated to open in Bedford early next year. That one will be 184,000 square feet, Mosby said.

When the new Steelyard Supercenter gets running at full speed, it will have 350 employees. More than 5,000 already have applied for those positions - Wal-Mart’s anti-union stance and reputation for low wages and minimal health care coverage notwithstanding. Most of those applicants are Cleveland residents.

As of Monday afternoon, representatives of both the United Food & Commercial Workers Union Local 880 and “Wake Up Wal-Mart” said they were not aware of any plans to protest the opening.

Chris Jones, manager of the Steelyard Wal-Mart, said he’s confident inner-city Cleveland can support a giant Wal-Mart.

“Some folks think that because it’s down here . . . it won’t do well,” Jones said. “But we’re looking for people to understand that they have an area that feels like Westgate or Great Northern [malls], only it’s where they live and do business.”

That’s consistent with Kastelic’s view. He’s not a fan of big-box stores generally but said he can’t deny that a Wal-Mart Supercenter at Steelyard Commons will help make up for the 2 million-square-foot “deficit” in the amount of retail space that his study suggests the city could support.

“I think it shows that there’s a demand for this locally,” he said. “I think it’s basically capturing the people that are already there. The city just doesn’t have anything like this.”

Wal-Mart, for its part, is taking steps to fit in, giving grants to local nonprofit organizations and adjusting stock to meet the demands of Steelyard’s urban customer base.

One of the store’s first grants went to Tremont West Development Corp., whose director, Chris Garland, said the group will use the money to “further positively leverage” its efforts to reduce interest rates on home loans for neighborhood residents.

Other grant recipients include City Mission, Greater Cleveland Youth for Christ, Cuyahoga Community College, Spanish American Committee for a Better Community, Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Scranton Road Ministries and Community Care Network.

Responding to recent events, the store also made a donation to Cleveland’s SuccessTech Academy, where a student recently went on a shooting spree.

Within the Supercenter itself, store manager Jones said he has devoted four to six times the usual shelf space for items targeting Hispanic and black customers.

Likewise, Jones has shrunk his camping department in favor of larger sections for fishing and biking, activities he said are of greater interest to city dwellers. “We can kind of cut up the box for different areas,” he said. “We have the ability . . . to expand or add in categories that we have more of a need for.”

Wal-Mart is not the first retailer in the area to attempt to reflect the cultural identities of the community. Dan Saltzman, president of Dave’s Markets, said his company, too, is working harder to appeal to Hispanic shoppers.

Dave’s spent nearly $1 million converting its store near Ridge Road and Denison Avenue into Dave’s Mercado, a supermarket carrying a wide array of foods catering to Hispanics. Signs there are in both English and Spanish, and employees wear badges reading “Yo Hablo Espanol” ("I speak Spanish").

It’s all part of bracing for competition with Wal-Mart. “We have responded to this challenge in a unique way,” Saltzman said in an e-mail.

Adjustments like these are beside the point for Nu Wexler, spokesman for Wal-Mart Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based organization committed to “getting Wal-Mart to respond to a wide array of concerns about its business practices.”

He said he’s more concerned with the way Wal-Mart arrived in Cleveland in the first place.

A message on his group’s Web site summarizes Wal-Mart’s strategy as a “bait and switch.” Wexler said Wal-Mart waited until the Cleveland City Council dropped an ordinance that would have prevented it from selling groceries, then filed permits to build.

“They came in through the back door,” he said in an interview. “It’s a case study . . . of what happens when a community lets its guard down.”

But Robert Simons, a professor of urban planning and real estate in the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, said there was nothing underhanded about Wal-Mart’s method.

“They played by the rules, and they won,” he said.

They’ll keep on winning, too, if predictions for Steelyard Commons come true.

Simons said Wal-Mart has every reason to flourish, despite the presence of competitors Target, Home Depot, BestBuy and PetCo literally across the street.

Rather than steal customers from those stores, Wal-Mart will attract more customers to the area, benefiting every store in Steelyard Commons, he said.

“They’re all complementary. . . . These kind of centers really benefit from a lot of traction.”