El Cajon mall to get first custom-built Wal-Mart

Shopping Centers Today Newswire
Friday, Feb. 20, 2004

Westfield Shoppingtown Parkway, in El Cajon, Calif., about 15 miles northeast of San Diego, will be home to the very first custom-built Wal-Mart anchor.

The 160,000-square-foot store, which is scheduled to open in the fall, will also be the first two-level unit that Wal-Mart has built from the ground up.

Wal-Mart does have a few other stores at malls, but they replace former tenants, says company spokesman Peter Kanelos.

The El Cajon store will feature a special escalator to which customers can attach their shopping carts. Shoppers will also be allowed to bring the carts inside the enclosed mall. Thus, the mall will be similar to the hypermarket-anchored centers of Europe, with shoppers passing freely between the anchor and in-line stores. (An electronic barrier will prevent cart theft by locking a wheel on any cart rolled beyond a fixed point.)

Multilevel stores are not Wal-Mart’s first choice for a location, Kanelos says, but they are sometimes the only choice in the urban areas where the company seeks to expand.

“They’re a lot more complicated to operate,” he said, “but there are certain markets where land is at a premium. We have to look at all of those opportunities.”

Wal-Mart already operates two multilevel stores and has another set to open in the spring (all in California), but those units are inside the shells of previous tenants.

Among the other big-box stores at the 1.1 million-square-foot Shoppingtown Parkway are Best Buy and Borders. The department store anchors include J.C. Penney, Mervyn’s, Robinsons-May and Sears.