Walking through my local Wal-Mart Supercenter i couldn’t help but notice the very high ceilings, that had almost no purpose. Aside from the tire racks, or scaffold of paper towels, the shelf height is probably around 10 feet, while the ceilings have to be around 40 feet high.
Why do they need such high ceilings? Doesn’t it cost more to build, maintain, heat, and cool that big of an area as opposed to ceilings 20 feet high?
The average Supercenter is something like 180,000 sq. ft, by my calculations thats 7.2 million cubic feet on a 40 foot ceiling.
If the average shelf height is 12 feet, they only use 2.16 million cubic feet. Leaving 5.04 million cubic feet of nothing…what gives?
the building has greater resale value as an industrial, warehouse, commercial instead of just a commercial building, so when the Supercenter closes and a Megasupercenter is build a few blocks away they can sell the building easier.
You can find some statements that it is a marketing ploy - high ceilings make you feel less constrained, freer and more impulsive, hence more likely to buy crap.
The cost to heat, cool, etc is not related to the amount of space in a building (at least not directly) - its related to the surface area of the building. Stationary air masses are not good heat conductors.
It is indeed all about the consumer atmosphere. People are more comfortable with the high ceilings.
I always feel closed in and almost uncomfortable if I’m in a large building but the ceilings are the standard 8-10 feet high. Perhaps I’ve been slowly conditioned to feel this way from shopping in Targets and Walmarts.
Don’t know about why they have high ceilings, but I would the Insurance Man has something to say about how limiting how high products can be stacked. At least, that’s what one Big Box employee told me once.
Julia Christensen has been studying how big box store locations (former Wal-Mart and other stores) have been reused around the country. Some are used for other retail stores, or as churches, housing, schools or community centers.
I doubt they are 40 feet. Standard for warehouse and big box stores is around 25 feet. I’d expect the square footage to be closer to 50,000-80,000sf
One reason is it’s a standard height. They don’t need to re-engineer building designs, lighting, HVAC, sprinklers etc. Contractors can build these buildings very quickly whether it be for Target, Walmart or any other business without having to have special steel fabricated for the project.
It is a lot easier to sell,buy, and re purpose buildings that are a standard height. If a business wants a lower ceiling they can hang a ceiling at any height.
People like the open feeling.
Most big box stores are self insured and set their stacking and shelving rules on a company by company basis.
OSHA has rules concerning shelving and palletising but most stores have far stricter standards. Local ordinances and fire inspectors sometimes impose restrictions as well.
In higher population area’s its not uncommon for Walmart and other big box stores to relocate based one sales and available square footage. Also big box stores don’t typically own the properties. They buy the land put up a building and sell it off to a property management company. Those companies probably have standards they expect if they are going to purchase it.
Yeah, I was going to say 40 feet is pretty high. You don’t realize quite how high 40 feet is unless you’ve had to change lightbulbs on a ceiling that high (as I did in a former job of mine). 40 feet is probably close to what a high school gymnasium would be.
This is one of the main arguments against Wal-Mart. The buildings they build are so utilitarian they don’t raise the property values of those other buildings around them.
Of course proWal-Mart versus antiWal-Mart is another thread
Something that’s gone unmentioned: it’s only recently that Wal-Mart (and other big boxes) has lowered its shelving, in an effort to appear more friendly and shoppable. For the most of last couple of decades, Wal-Marts routinely used risers (shelf gondola extensions above 6 feet or so) and highwalls (similar high extensions on shelves attached to walls) to store massive amounts of overstock, often just a couple of feet from the ceiling. For years, this empty space was used. And most stores were built when high stacking was common.
Easily stackable or lightweight merchandise, like cases of paper towels, could be stacked in the air incredibly high… IIRC, as long as a stacking job was stable (passed a “bump test” where the stocker actually went to both sides of a gondola and rammed the shelves to check stability) and policy allowed high stacking in a given department (likely in lawn and garden or paper goods, less likely in pharmacy or shoes), the merchandise could get within 18 or 24 inches from the ceiling. That clear height from the ceiling was the minimum necessary to allow fire sprinklers to still reasonably perform in the event of a fire, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was due to federal law rather than corporate kindness.
The current low-shelving, open sightline thing is a newish strategy to appear less formidable and more inviting to shoppers.
I work at Target. We use a lot of that extra space in the back room for storage, and I’m guessing it would look funny from the outside if just part of the building were that tall…
Plus the extra height makes it easier to see the hanging signs labeling the various departments from anywhere in the store.
The “old” walmart in my town has a regular height ceiling and it does very much feel like a labyrinth compared to the supercenter across town. Both unnerve me, but for different reasons.
Weird. Around here, they almost always tear down the old buildings and rebuild from scratch.
I don’t know why. Seems silly to tear down the old Super K-Mart to build the new Super Walmart when they’re pretty much the same store from different owners, but it happened.
