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What’s wrong with it?
Ever been to a dollar store?
The reason is that they often need to have just 1-2 employees to cut costs and stay competitive.Are those stains or shadows?
Yes
I am honestly not noticing anything particularly bad myself. I could take picture of a local store in worse condition but its mostly due to the fact it’s alpt older than all the other grocery establishments near by and I think the company has deemed it unnecessary to support as much.
man getcho ass off ya high ass horse. ghoof aah
This fool shops at Erewhon and pays $10 for cucumber water
Could probably be me being ignorant, but how does this look “run down” exactly? It looks like a Walmart, and them looking like this is not strictly a US thing. Walmarts look exactly like this in Mexico too, and from what ever little I seen of em, also look the same in Canada.
But to answer your question, no. Not all shops in the US look have the Walmart look.
Dude, you’re in a Walmart. You can’t have peopleofwalmart.com AND have a polished ceiling. There’s a reason their stuff is so cheap.
Ignorant American here: what looks “run down” about it?
I’m not in the US but what makes you feel this is run down?
Even the worst store in Germany looks better than this.
The ceiling looks incomplete with no wall and the color scheme is drab and dreary.
Can you show us what you think they should look like?
Coz I’ve seen Americans, Australians, and Europeans call this normal looking. So I’d love to see what you think isn’t.
The “unfinished” ceilings are common in warehouse stores. It is largely a feature of practicality. Since electrical, water and ventilation typical run overhead and needs to be serviced occasionally, putting drop ceiling tiles up would make them difficult to work with, particularly when you need a scissor lift (rather than a ladder) to reach the utility lines. But it also has some benefits like higher lighting fixtures which means less direct/more ambient lighting, fewer places for pests to roam in the building or dust to build up, etc. It may just be that I’m used to it, but it doesn’t bother me as an aesthetic. Drop ceiling is more common in smaller stores.
Not sure what you mean by the drab colors. The floor looks like it could be whiter and probably needs a polish, but the blues look nice enough to me. There’s not much to decorate though as most of the story is wide open with very few surfaces that aren’t covered in products for sale.
Pretty much anywhere you have overhead storage with forklifts, you’re going to not have a drop ceiling. Otherwise you’d just have people hitting the damn ceiling with the forklift. They already hit the sprinklers enough.
Yeah, I’m sure that is the primary reason.
For large chains in the suburbs this is totally normal. They’re basically warehouses in a sea of parking lots filled with shelves and racks. Sometimes there’s carpeted areas in between the tile walkways or displays that go up high enough that it feels enclosed. For smaller or more urban stores, you don’t see this kind of construction.
that’s pretty common for big box stores. they’re put up cheaply and the buildings are only rated to last 15 years in some cases.
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That ceiling is supposed to be that way. The insulation is on top of the roof deck, and the lack of a suspended ceiling gives it a more open feel. That’s why they painted all of the roof structure white (it also allows them to use less power for lighting). Walmart has a lot of problems, but store design isn’t one (although retail layout is, IMO).
We have a few of these warehouse type shops in the UK, Costco, Matalan, that sort of thing, it’s not styled like a high street shop would be.
My local Asda is like this, but they’re Walmart now. I’ve got a feeling that the Tesco is too, but I haven’t been for a while.
Yeah, the bigger supermarkets are too aren’t they? Like there’s some lovely supermarkets with nice styling, but they’re usually the little ones.
My Tesco Extra looks nice and has a ceiling with very cool lighting. Big local Sainsbury’s has a ceiling, but they should definitely improve cleanliness in some areas. And ASDA Superstore is a filthy mess. I try to avoid it, because it’s disgusting.
Oh yeah, this is super standard. Honestly I had to scroll down to find what was even notable to you about this picture. I live in a major city and basically every store I go in to looks identical to this.
That’s just a default Walmart, unironically.
This isn’t a Walmart. It’s Mejer.
Huh, I thought Meyer was red, more like Target
You might be thinking of Fred Meyer, which is red.
Or Oscar Meyer which is a hotdog.
Or Lane Meyer who thought he was better off dead.
My bologna has a first name…
It’s a Wal-Mart so yeah, that’s normal.
It’s not a Walmart.
This is totally normal for Walmart to look like. It’s basically a warehouse with extra steps.
Ceiling design is intentional, it’s cheap and it maintains temperature much better than a drop ceiling or whatever else you’d want up there.
Walmart normally has skylights too to let in natural light but I can’t see any in the pic. That looks like a poorly maintained Walmart.
This isn’t a Walmart. It’s Mejer.
Yeah I knew it wasn’t walmart by the stuff at checkout not being the right color, but I’ve never seen a Mejer before. I take it they’re basically the same thing as malwart?
More expensive, has NFC, but essentially the same stuff as a Walmart.
You’re in a Walmart.
They claim to be cheaper so they can have that drabby distopian look.
In the good parts of town, they look nicer. In the poor parts of town they’re legit worse than that.
Fwiw, I’ll pay the extra dollar per shopping cart for the superior look of a target. Target is generally cleaner and crisper looking. As always there are exceptions to that rule.
Also the implication that countries outside the US don’t have dumpy stores is laughable. Europe’s got plenty of stuff like this, just usually not as large. Here in the Netherlands we have shops like Action and grocery stores like Lidl and they’re a shitshow inside most of the time.
Lidl in the US is definitely a step up from Wal-Mart.
Welcome to Costco. I love you
Target has been going downhill. Lots of crap in the aisles now, and inventory is stocked during the day. It’s like shopping in a warehouse.
It varies. My Target is exactly the same as it ever was.
It’s incredibly difficult to find anything at Target, especially gender-neutral hygiene products since they hard-segregated hygiene into men’s and women’s. Just give me regular ass bar soap.
My partner was looking for coffee and looked all over the tea section and nope, naturally coffee belongs next to the liquor and red vines.
I hate going to Target, but I still take it over Walmart. At least I don’t feel dirty shopping at Target.Retail in general is hiring much less staff these days so they always look like shit. I heard on the radio that they are removing self checkout now too because of theft? I doubt they will increase staff back up to compensate. I kind of want to be there in rush hour the first time to watch the shit show.
The economics of removing self checkout are not there. You check 6 customers per attendant at self checkout - the store would need to lose $150,000 in merchandise at self check out per year to break even (assuming $30k/yr for the wage slave).
In a previous life, I did loss prevention. The average shrink rate in retail in the USA is 2%. That means 2% of the merchandise leaves the store without being paid for.
An average Walmart does millions in sales each day. Conservatively 2% of one million is $20,000.
Thousands of dollars of unpaid merchandise leaves a big retailer every single day. It’s part of the cost of doing business. That’s also why online retailers are cheaper. They don’t have to deal with external theft. They still have internal theft.
Shrink is the industry term. It’s merchandise that isn’t paid for and isn’t there when inventory happens. Theft is most of it, both by customers (external) and employees (internal). It’s also things that aren’t rang up right at the register, damaged merchandise that isn’t removed from the system correctly. It’s a big umbrella term.
That’s a Meijer
Wasn’t sure at first, but then I saw the mPerks sign.
Ugh. Target feels suffocating to me with all the red and the way everything feels like an end table covered in popurrí.
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Fair enough. Those don’t exist anywhere near me. IMO blue = Walmart
Haha that’s my favorite opinion
That’s not run down, that’s a warehouse. Is it falling apart? Is the flooring worn? Are the walls cracking? Ceilings leaking? That’s what run down means, not whatever your weird complaint is about the decor and color scheme is.
Nah, usually some of the lights are out and there is mushy spots on the ceiling.
The big box store chain esthetic. Ostensibly about passing value onto the customer (we put a roof over the products, what more do you want?) but probably more about maximizing shareholder value.
In fairness from the perspective of someone who has had to pull a lot of network cable in buildings before, drywall ceilings SUCK, drop ceilings are fine but can really be a pain, and open ceilings are chefs kiss soooooo much easier to work with. I promise that’s true for your HVAC, fire sprinklers, electrical/lighting, and plumbing guys too. Particularly when you have to work on a scissor lift for those high ceilings, rather than on a 6ft ladder. From a practicality standpoint, open ceilings are way better for maintenance and new installations.
Pretty much par for the course for a Walmart/any other store like it. Also they look exactly the same in Canada. Cruddy lighting, cheap beige laminate floors… Bleh.
European here: looks perfectly normal to me.
Same, looks identical to what I’d see here in Australia.
Based on your and the other guy’s comment this sounds like European/Old-World identity bias (and a bit of availability bias); Assuming that other countries within one’s group-identity are very similar and [non-European country] is a lone standout when it comes to some aspect that one just learned they differ on. It’s so common to see these kinds of comments on posts of the form ‘why do American’s do this one weird thing different than everyone else’.
Nothing as complex as that. Merely not willing to dox myself and limiting the details about my exact location. :)
I don’t understand your reply; I think you misunderstood my comment. OP is from Ireland (Europe), I’m saying that he is the one with Euro-identity bias, not you. From his locality within Europe, American shops appear ‘rundown’ in presentation, and there’s an implied suggestion that this is a uniquely American thing (within the global North-West). With that comes the bias that since he’s in Europe, the rest of Europe (or global North-West in general) would share this perspective.
I’ve had this same bias myself, having grown up in Italy I had assumed that was generally representative of Europe and there were many things I thought of as purely American that were actually common in parts of Europe.
Someone calls out someone for something, other people respond someone isn’t doing anything unusual from their POV?, you waffle on about some irrelevant nonsense. Funny.
I think it’s a size thing. At some point it just doesn’t make sense to put in a lowered ceiling, because it costs a lot of money for no purpose and still looks like shit. Large stores in Europe also have visible airducts and supports etc.
Also, some malls have rules for what tenants are allowed to do with it, either for safety reasons (water sprinklers/fire alarms) or just because they don’t want to repaint or remove whatever the tenant did with it before they went bankrupt.
This is what every Meijer I’ve been to looks like. Yes, this is a Meijer, not Walmart.
Actually looks pretty clean to me. The ceiling having nothing but beams is pretty standard issue.
Looks like a normal grocery store to me. If you want run down looking you should see what family dollar stores look like.
Or a K-Mart. Any of them.
It was the first store I thought of but I haven’t seen one in years. The ones here made family dollar look good and Walmart look upscale.
LOL, what K-Mart? They’re (rightfully) long gone, at least from around here.
Apparently they are still around in Australia. They just had a Hamas related marketing snafu.
Latest John Oliver on Dollar stores:
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Yeah dollar stores are the worst. They usually only have 1 or 2 employees and everything is everywhere. I don’t blame the employees, the store management needs to hire enough people to staff the fucking things.
