When Walmart pulls out of town, the stores next door don’t pick up its shoppers — their sales are down 20% a year later

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The decline keeps getting worse, reaching about 17% in the ninth month and 20% a year after the anchor store closes.

Shoppers often greet the closure of a Walmart with dismay, while competitors find cause to celebrate.

Among critics of the big-box behemoth, a long-held assumption is that once a Walmart disappears, shoppers seeking groceries, household goods, meals and services will flow to businesses down the road.

We are marketing scholars who have studied dozens of Walmart closures in the United States. We found that nearby stores saw a slump in both monthly shopper traffic and sales revenue by roughly a quarter in contrast to comparable stores near Walmart locations that remained open. Our sample covered 39 Walmart stores that closed across 20 states from 2019 to 2026.

This finding suggests a large retailer can play two roles at once. Walmart competes with neighboring businesses for shopper visits and spending. But it can also act as an anchor, giving people a reason to travel to a shopping area in the first place. When that anchor disappears, the loss of shared shopper traffic can outweigh the benefit of having one less competitor.

Our finding underscores that retailers don’t operate as isolated dots on a map. Shoppers often decide where to go before deciding which stores they’ll visit once they get there. A trip to Walmart can generate a stop at a nearby restaurant, pharmacy, salon, specialty retailer or service business.

Economists call this kind of benefit an agglomeration effect: Businesses can gain from being near other businesses because the location itself attracts shoppers. Shopping center owners have long recognized this logic by using prominent stores to anchor a mix of tenants.

Other researchers have found that Walmart’s entry into a shopping area causes sales in nearby existing stores to drop. But these shops can adjust their product assortment, prices and promotions to mitigate this effect, follow-up studies suggest. What has not been studied until now is what happens when a Walmart store – or any other anchor store – closes.

A Walmart closure creates a tug-of-war…

This…

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