Atlanta – Walmart will
reduce the size of its CE departments, even as it expands their assortments.
According to Roz Brewer,
president of the 1,600-store Walmart East division, the retailer is
“readjusting” the departments to reflect the smaller space requirements of
popular CE devices like Apple’s iPad and iPhone.
Her comments, made here
Tuesday at a retail conference held by ISI Group, a research and investment
firm, follow Walmart’s previously announced plans to
of CE and other categories later this year.
Brewer said the CE
department resets would be part of the retailer’s ongoing store remodeling
program.
“We had expanded
electronics to accommodate that category and we are readjusting that now,” she
told attendees. “It’s still a very vibrant category, but they’re smaller unit
items being sold [and] we’re much more aligned with Apple right now. We are
offering the iPad and the iPhone and those kinds of items, and it really does
not require as much space as we had projected in the year past … So we are
actually going to reduce that pad size so that we can accommodate the other
areas that we want to expand in the store.”
Brewer added that the TV
wall is also being modified to reflect “where the technology is going.”
The CE departments could
be trimmed by about 2,000 square feet per store according to an estimate by Janney
Capital Markets analyst David Strasser that was reported by Reuters.
