Walmart Supercenter - Waterford, CT - STORE TOURS

Walmart Supercenter - Waterford, CT - STORE TOURS

  March 11, 2018    Robby S.

---

The front facade of the store ©JJbers via Flickr

WALMART SUPERCENTER 
155 WATERFORD PKWY N. 
BUILT/OPENED 1995 

Before I get into the main article, I'd love to take a moment to explain this post as it takes on a different approach from the rest of my published articles. This is the first post in a new series I'm starting titled 'Store Tours', where instead of documenting the retail of yesteryear, I instead focus on the retail of today.



I thought it would only be appropriate to begin with the behemoths that are the Walmart Supercenters, so now let's get on with the tour!

The Walmart Supercenter in Waterford, CT was built in 1995 in direct competition to Caldor. Walmart built their store directly behind the then-struggling Caldor, which opened in 1983 and closed its doors in 1999. After Caldor's closure, Ames took over the property operating a store until Ames' liquidation in 2002.

When the Walmart Supercenter opened in Waterford, it was a marvel of retail design. The Supercenter concept was new to Walmart, with the first Supercenter concept location opening only two years earlier in 1988. The new hypermarket concept combined a department store with a grocery store and an array of other amenities such as a McDonald's, nail and hair salon, optical center, photo center, and more. This new format would then become the gold standard for Walmart stores, with the company soon converting most of its stores to the hypermarket format.

Something else I'd like to throw out there is that the Waterford Walmart has been the crown jewel of the company within the southeast Connecticut region. Nearby Walmart locations in Groton and Norwich, Conn., which remain as standard, non-Supercenter locations, have been test stores for new layouts such as Walmart's new black-and-white interior concept.

The new black-and-white interior concept tested at some nearby stores ©ABC13

Now back to the Waterford Walmart...

When the store opened, it rocked the standard blue, white, and red livery that most stores at the time sported. Admittedly, it looks a million times cooler than the boring 50-shades-of-brown stores we have today.

The exterior of the Waterford Walmart before renovations ©Electrical Services Group LLC

A stock image that I found featuring the Waterford Walmart ©Getty Images

I wish that Walmart would switch the exterior colors of their stores back to blue, red, and gray. It looks fantastic!

The interior of the store is what you would expect your usual Walmart Supercenter to look like. Below is a map of the store to give you an idea as to where each department is.




Now getting on with the tour, the first part of the store I visited was the Food Center. It's pretty big, featuring a full service Deli, Bakery, and Grab-n-Go Section. They also had a pretty solid selection of fresh produce and seafood for a Walmart store.

A quite shake picture of the produce section

Some pretty good looking produce

The deli department

The rest of the food center was pretty good as well. The shelves were kept in good order and overall everything was really clean


The meat department was stationed along the rightmost wall. Refrigeration coolers went down the middle of the aisle which also held a variety of frozen and refrigerated goods.



The rest of the food department really was your usual Walmart Supercenter food department.

A usual aisle in the Food Center

Looking down the left major aisle of the food center

Looking towards the front of the store from the back of the food center

Now moving to the rest of the store:
The Walmart Pharmacy was located in quite the interesting place... It's located kind of in the center of the store adjacent to the food center. What's particularly interesting is that the pharmacy is 'free-standing' in the fact that it's surrounded with sales floor on all sides.

The oddly placed pharmacy is in the middle of the store

The men's apparel section in the center of the store

Cleaning supplies

Baby Clothing and Apparel

Electronics/Entertainment

Electronics/Video Games

Home and Living

Looking back into the outdoors section. The automotive section is further behind it

Toys

Looking towards the right side of the store on the main passageway

Home Decor

Despite being a Walmart Supercenter, the store only has 12 traditional checkout counters. It used to be around 40 but in 2016 Walmart started adding in these Self-Checkout stations (which personally I'm not a fan of)

The customer service desk which also houses the Photo Center and the Walmart.com pickup

The other half of the front end of the store, which houses an arcade, restrooms, and the optical center. Around tax return season, Jackson Hewitt runs a tax return booth, which you can see in this picture behind the restrooms.

In traditional Walmart spirit, a fast food restaurant, in this case McDonald's, is housed within the restaurant. I don't believe there have been any extensive renovations on the McDonald's since Walmart first opened in the 1995

Now something else that's kind of cool about the Waterford Walmart is that there used to be a SmartStyle Hair Salon which recently closed. The pad is now vacant and there are some little windows to peep into

Here's a picture of the salon before it closed 

©Kris W via Yelp

As it stands today, all the signage has been removed and there's a big ad for renting the area.

Some leftover signs in the window of the salon

There's not too much to see inside of the salon. It looks like they took EVERYTHING out, so it's really just a few white walls and some markings on the ground that still remain:

So that about sums it up for the Waterford Supercenter. Please, let me know what you guys think of this whole 'Store Tours' concept and let me know if you want to see more in the future! I have a few more planned that I'll release soon, so hopefully by then I'll have a clearer idea of how to structure these.

Until next time,