The world's first high-end Wal-Mart

[kurth]

In Texas, the Biggest Box Gets Mighty Fancy Trimmings
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 13, 2006; C01

PLANO, Tex. -- The world's first high-end Wal-Mart has grocery aisles nearly wide enough to drive a Volkswagen down... The corporation calls this high-end store on the windy prairieburbs a one-time experiment, a laboratory box store set among the beautiful box stores north of Dallas... The place was designed, Wal-Mart officials have said, to drive women wild, and at the same time appeal to men with a certain retail savvy. It is, as one executive told the press, a Wal-Mart for people who aren't much for yardwork and wouldn't dream of changing their own oil. Instead, you talk to these customers about the $18.64 bottle of EVOO. Most of the store's 200,000-plus square feet of floor are a polished, earthy-colored concrete. In some departments -- fashion, linens -- the floors are blond hardwood. We snack on rosy red sashimi at the sushi bar and surf the free Wi-Fi in the cafe...

The employees have been liberated of their blue smocks, and talk (twitchily, though) about how happy their newfound khakiness makes them. There is no Wal-Martish Muzak playing, but there are flat-panel displays suspended from the ceiling here and there, and always seem to be playing a Jack Johnson music video... There's never a wait at the registers...

In this store, Wal-Mart is working out some of its Target envy (vaguely Euro), along with a smidge of Whole Foods envy (it's in how you stack the organic vegetables), and a lot of Best Buy envy (the gizmofication of everything)... Time passes, loitering around the world's nicest, newest nowhere. The shoppers here frequently say, in the sweetest Texas drawls, "Excuse me" and "Ooops, I'm sorrrrry" when their carts are even remotely in your way. So we bump into them sort of intentionally. This might be our very favorite thing of all: the infinite politeness. They've all read their Joel Osteen. They're all living purpose-driven lives...

Joan Didion once said the only thing she missed about California was the grocery stores. Perhaps she never pushed a shopping cart in Texas, land of the designer supermarket wars, which is where the Whole Foods empire started. (Whole Foods fails these days to elicit huge thrills among Texas foodinistas; what they all want now is something called Central Market, a higher-end gourmet paradise conceived by the H.E. Butts chain in the 1990s in Austin and spread to Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth and, of course, Plano.) The high-end Wal-Mart claims to have 2,000 grocery items not previously available to its shoppers, most of them organic. That's a lot of different kinds of balsamic vinaigrette... And in the long, long aisle that is the wine department, there are four bottles of La Mondotte 1999 Comtes de Neipperg selling for $557.47 each...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/12/AR2006041202125.html

[BrklynLiberal]

1. I've noticed that Plano, Texas is the center for a lot of bad things.

Among some of the other bad news that came from there, that is where the mother cut off her baby's arms.
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/nation/14150098.htm

I know there are lots of good, decent people there, but there must be something in the water there.

[bryant69]

2. Interesting

Sounds like a nice store - but Wal-Mart hasn't gotten where they are today by outclassing their competition.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[DUHandle]

3. It's all junk

and it's all cheap!

[adarling]

4. Central Market does kick whole foods ass!

ahahhaa, i still hate walmart. In McKinney we have the "enviromentally safe" walsmart. Its cool, but there is still something evil about it, like the south park episode.

[enid602]

5. "The world's first high-end Wal-Mart"

That's a pretty good description of Neiman Marcus.

[LSparkle]

6. Just cuz you put lipstick on a pig ... doesn't mean it's not a pig

I HATE WAL-MART! If they wanted to be REALLY classy, they'd pay their employees decent wages, offer health care at a reasonable cost, give them 401(k)s and tell them to ditch the smocks -- IN ALL THEIR STORES.

[rainbow4321]

7. Um, they forgot a few things about Plano:

1> Teenage heroin use is on the rise yet AGAIN (dozen deaths in the 90's)
2> Those 4,000 square foot homes? Plano has one of the highest foreclosure rates in North Texas due to lay offs/outsourcing/closures
3> The article claims to hear no yelling toddlers...because that part of Plano all has nannies..so the toddlers ARE screaming, just at HOME and not w/ their yuppie, out-shopping-everyday-mommies.
4> Plano made the cover of Newsweek mag not long ago..massive steroid use by our high school athletes. Shortly after the article, the district hired a full time "steroid czar"..after months of denying there was a steroid problem, that is.

From the same article:

Wal-Mart picked perhaps one of the sweetest spots in the national retailscape to throw shoppers a curve: Collin County, Tex., embodying everything both dreamily enviable and vaguely unnerving about modern paradise. The average home here (almost always red brick, with soaringly pitched shingled roofs)tops 4,000 square feet; a Wal-Mart executive claims the average household here earns $145,000 a year. Across the North Dallas Tollway from this Wal-Mart is a Hummer dealer, a Saab dealer and a Costco. There's a Baptist church down the road big enough for 26,000 members, which nevertheless is thinking about expanding its congregation to a site farther north.

[RB TexLa]

14. ahh, Parker Road and the Tollway

That's where it's going to be, The shops at Willow Bend?

[rainbow4321]

16. That's the area...

Like the Willow Bend crowd would dare to even be seen in a Walmart, right?

[RB TexLa]

17. What's funny about that area

Yes you can buy a 50 to 70K truck, and you can buy a bunch of tacky expensive things. There are only a couple of things we will spend money that would be called upscale on and for me it's clothing. You go down Preston to the park cities area and you can buy a $2500 suit and a few months later still feel you've gotten what you paid for. You don't go through the suits on a long rack, you tell them what you are looking for and they bring them out to you. The salespeople know what they are talking about, they know where the suits were made, the owner has been where they are made. When the suit is altered they bring it to your office or home. Same with furniture, the one thing she enjoys spending money on.

There is always one quick tell tell sign for a store that is worth spending huge amounts of money in and one that wants to be thought of as such. If there is something on the retail floor with a 100K price tag they don't know what they are doing and the people trying to sell the stuff have no more expertise about what they are doing then someone browsing because they want to be around a $100k price tag. No one buying items with that big a ticket buys them off a retail floor. There is store in the Galleria that from time to time has good prices on crystal, they always have some stupid crystal statue of a cat or dog or something like that with a $200K price tag on it. The salespeople know nothing about crystal, I hate giving them a commission on something that should be sold with knowledge but they often have very good sales. As far as the $200K piece I think they have 4 or 5 in the back that they rotate out.

[Vinnie From Indy]

8. Wal-Mart is the devil's spawn

It is tragic to think of all the other American morons that line up at Wal-Mart every weekend to buy crap and never give a thought to the fact that Wal-Mart could just as easily destroy their jobs as they have done to workers in manufacturing here in America. What is to stop the boys in Bentonville to let's say get into the accounting business or maybe the law business or you name it? While Wal-Mart may not be as thoroughly evil as the tobacco and oil industries, they come very close.

[countingbluecars]

9. High-end Wal-Mart

That an oxymoron if I ever heard one.

[sinkingfeeling]

10. Plano, Texas is one hellhole they couldn't pay me to live in. And yes,

I lived near there for a couple of years. Made alot of trips to visit all those HQs.

[kurth]

12. Guys in golf shirts and Sansabelt pants and women in bright fake jewelry

Houston Chronicle / July 23, 2004
To Lance, hometown just a bad memory
Armstrong grew to detest Plano in high school years
By THOMAS KOROSEC

PLANO - New York City has had an official Lance Armstrong Day, and Austin has had two. But here in the town where the cycling star was raised, Armstrong's name is as apt to invoke expressions of discomfort and regret... "If they held a Lance Armstrong Day, he'd probably boycott it," said Jack English, principal of Bending Oaks High School in Dallas, from which Armstrong graduated in 1989...

In his ghostwritten 2000 autobiography, It's Not About the Bike, Armstrong calls this Dallas suburb of 240,000 residents "soul-deadening" and conformist to a fault. Born in Dallas, Armstrong moved with his family to an apartment in suburban Richardson, then to a house in Plano, when he was young. "It was the quintessential American suburb, with strip malls, perfect grid streets and faux-antebellum country clubs in between empty brown wasted fields," he writes. "It was populated by guys in golf shirts and Sansabelt pants and women in bright fake gold jewelry, and alienated teenagers." If you were not upper middle class or a football player, he writes, "you didn't exist."

As the son of a secretary, who raised him as a single parent, and as an aspiring athlete with little hand-eye coordination and no skill at moving laterally, he was neither. "I felt shunned at times," he recalls in the book. "I was the guy who did weird sports and who didn't wear the right labels." Kids in the "social" group made fun of his Lycra shorts. His adolescent resentments became fuel for his competitive fire, he writes. "Back then I was just a kid with about four chips on his shoulder, thinking, 'Maybe if I ride my bike on this road long enough it will take me out of here.'" Armstrong's most pointed criticism he saves for Plano East Senior High School, "one of the largest and most football-crazed high schools in the state." ...

[rainbow4321]

19. Plano East still ignores anything besides football

I'm still surprised that the school's golf team and the lacrosse kids even get any funding at all for their activities. Hell, it took an article in the local newspaper to get the girl's locker room doors fixed...they saw one guy strolling thru it one night. One girl had her car keys stolen and then her car that same night. The school said that they had been asking the district for a very, very long time to fix it. But the boys locker had door locks and a security camera, I believe.

[WinkyDink]

11. Plano: 9 teen suicides in the 80's.

Started all the h.s. suicide prevention stuff.

[rainbow4321]

15. Yep..was called "Suicide Capital of the country"

And, no, I am not kidding...for doubters: google the words along w/ "Plano".

One other tidbit about the county that Plano is in...the amount of $$ an indigent has to make to qualify for the county's health care program/insurance: roughly, $2,000/YEAR. Not month or quarterly, per YEAR. And local politicians are really proud of that. They say it has kept non-indigent residents' taxes from being raised. So they are very happy when the county's poor go down to Dallas County's public hospital and then Collin County doesn't hasve to reimburse Dallas cuz in Collin's eye$, the people/patients are not officialy indigent.



8 frigging hours in a "upscale" Walmart in the richest quadrant of the city and the WP feels they are qualified to heap praises on Plano by using stats of income and house size?? I'm sure the Plano Chamber of Commerce is pleased.

[Initech]

13. No matter how hard it tries...

Wal-Mart will ALWAYS be the least classy store ever in the history of mankind.

[warrens]

18. This is just a test

They are just doing it to test merchandise, some fixturing and that kind of stuff. There is no danger of this ever becoming widespread. They do this from time to time to find a few things that are reproducible enough to roll out to their real stores.

[Jim Warren]

20. Exxxxxcellent

I've been waiting for this. It means the beginning of the end for them just as it did so many big box stores in retail history. Just ask Sears.

[mitchum]

21. The new money hellhole of Plano is an apt place for this "high end "...

Wal Mart
This is actually very funny