24 hour Walmart in Las Vegas 

Covid-19 has changed the way people shop around the world. 

In the United States, online sales also increased by 40% in August compared to the previous year. Americans spent 107 billion dollars more online than in 2019. 

The days of lazily strolling through the aisles are over, at least it will be so for a while longer. And this trend is most evident in Walmart's new stores, which the company unveiled last Friday. 

Project that will be adopted in 200 stores by the end of 2020, and in another 800 by the end of 2021.

New app-tailored design

Stores will still have narrow aisles and unfinished warehouse-style ceilings. But the news concerns the way in which we move in this space. 

Walmart is rearranging many items across the store, consolidating categories like electronics, toys, and baby products into dedicated sections. 

But it is also introducing clearer signage. In particular, the signs correspond to the exact categories and icons found within the Walmart app. The effect is a seamless shopping experience between the digital and physical store.
 

“We've always known that customers want to get in and out of a Walmart store as quickly as possible. Not in a bad way, they just don't want to waste time, ”says Janey Whiteside, Walmart's chief customer officer, who adds,“ This desire has increased during the pandemic because people want to feel safe. Speed ​​and clarity become much more important than what we had argued before, namely experience ". 

In short, there will still be areas in which to test products, but it is certainly not the experiential approach to retail pioneered by companies like Apple and even Walmart's competitor, Target. Walmart began redesigning its store about a year ago, long before the pandemic. 

The goal was to make shopping at Walmart a unique experience, in which the app and the store itself spoke the same language. “We are trying to save time for our customers, which we know is important to them, and to use less cognitive load, which we know is just as important,” says Whiteside. 

"People walk around the shop with smartphones in hand looking up and down, and we wanted to integrate these things so when they look at the phone they can see the same thing as the shop."

The app that acts as a compass

The Walmart app will direct customers to the exact locations of items within the store, with the aisles more easily identifiable with numbers and letters to help people find their way around. 

But even without the phone in hand, customers will be accompanied around the store by new signs almost everywhere. Once inside, in fact, an information panel indicates the main sections. It looks a lot like the kind of welcome you see in a theme park or airport. 

"When we first started doing this, the team spent a good deal of time experimenting with places where large groups of people are gathered that need to be quickly sorted, or directed somewhere," Whiteside continues. “We thought about airports because you don't spend a lot of time in them, so you don't know the routes. But people have to move in a timely manner ". 

Walmart has called these tools "navigation efficiency". And they will be seen at the entrance, but also in the new oversized blue signs on the areas that indicate, for example, the "Cheese" or "Fish Market" area. 

For people who don't read English, these giant writings may not be of much help, but by having the same icons in the multilingual Walmart app, people should be able to translate the various sections more easily. 

Finally, the new design also leaves its mark on the outside of the store. A large blue arch marks the retreat area, which should be visible from the parking lot. But Walmart's sign has also changed, from the large Walmart wordmark to a blue square that mimics its app icon. 

Walmart therefore marked an important point: shopping at Walmart does not mean staying in one of its stores, sitting in the car, browsing the Walmart app or using a PC browser. But all of these things together or - occasionally - some of these things at the same time.