Wal-Mart is about to build a store in Slave Lake, forever changing the retail business landscape of this community.
This is nothing new in Alberta. It’s happening in many other communities and as long as the Wal-Marts make money it will likely continue until the market is saturated.
The Leader contacted observers of the situation in four other Alberta communities to find out what the impact has been. From Drayton Valley’s one-month-old store to Camrose’s going-on five-year experience, here’s what we found out.
In Camrose, after initial “shock and awe,” downtown business is doing better than ever.
“Overall the impact has been dramatic,” says Dennis Twomey, the economic development officer for the city of nearly 16,000 an hour southeast of Edmonton.
The first six months were the worst. Downtown businesses “took a bit of a hit,” but then there was a comeback. Four years on, Twomey says there’s less vacancy and more traffic in downtown Camrose than before Wal-Mart. Any indicator you care to mention, he says, points to an improved economy, directly related to the major retail development on the edge of town. People are staying home to shop and people from out of town are shopping in Camrose when they didn’t used to.
“I don’t know how many vehicles were going through Camrose to shop in Edmonton,” he says. “We were hemorrhaging like crazy. We’ve put a band-aid on that.”
What’s good news for Camrose may be bad news for smaller towns in its trading area, such as Killam and Viking. Stettler too, until Wal-Mart opened a store there last fall. Prior to that, says Stettler Independent Editor Tom MacDougall, many Stettler shoppers spent their money in Camrose or Red Deer – both 55 minutes drive away.
“We had 40 per cent leakage (customers going elsewhere to shop),” says MacDougall. He thinks, but won’t know until the next survey, that the number has probably gone down since Wal-Mart came to town.
There have been other effects. The local True Value closed, although it isn’t certain that a loss of business was the reason. The Stettler SAAN closed its doors too, but that was a national, not local decision, MacDougall says. Interestingly, the Cold Lake SAAN didn’t close – just relocated closer to the Wal-Mart that opened on the edge of town in 2002.
MacDougall says his paper came out in support of the Wal-Mart, mainly because downtown Stettler was in decline anyway, plus the leakage situation.
It’s early days, but the impact hasn’t been too severe, in MacDougall’s opinion.
“We did a survey of our business community after Christmas,” he says. “The businesses that expected to be down were down but not as much as they expected. And some said they had a better Christmas.”
Meanwhile, traffic flow has certainly increased in the west end of town where Wal-Mart and the local mall are located. MacDougall says a couple of downtown businesses have relocated to the mall, which “was pretty much vacant.”
In Cold Lake there was a big initial effect, says Cold Lake Sun Editor Chris Miller.
“A few businesses closed down altogether,” he says. “A few downsized.”
The Home Hardware took another approach, expanding its floor space to meet the new challenge.
Miller says he thinks the adjustment period is pretty much over, and that “the ones that have made it this far are going to make it.”
Drayton Valley’s Wal-Mart opened just at the end of January of this year, giving existing businesses one more Wal-Mart free Christmas they hadn’t expected.
Long says two businesses in town have closed recently, and two others closed before the Wal-Mart came to Drayton Valley. It isn’t clear what role the Wal-Mart played in any of those closings, he says.
One thing that puzzles Long about Wal-Mart locating a store in Drayton is that it competes with other Wal-Marts in Stony Plain and Leduc. The towns of Breton and Evansburg are now about midway between Wal-Marts.
“But you have to assume a company that size knows what it’s doing.”
The same ‘cannibalizing’ effect will certainly happen to the St. Albert Wal-Mart when the one in Slave Lake opens. Wal-Mart’s Kevin Groh acknowledged as much in a phone interview back in November. Whether, or how much, the presence of big box stores in Slave Lake will change local shopping habits remains to be seen. Thanks to a survey by the local Community Development Corporation (CDC) a couple of years ago, baseline figures exist. They show, for example, that over 60 per cent of survey respondents purchase clothing elsewhere, mostly in Edmonton. Twenty-two percent of hardware purchases are in the city and 60 per cent of furniture. Over half the respondents said they buy jewelry and gifts out of town.
CDC Director Marilyn Cavanagh says her agency will be doing follow-up surveys to confirm the impact of big box stores when the time comes.

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