A Wal-Mart convenience store? Retail giant testing the concept

In a parking lot on Main Street in Crowley, Texas, a nondescript town of 14,000, Wal-Mart is testing out what it hopes could be its next small thing — a genuine convenience store.

Walk into the 2,500-square-foot store, and the surroundings feel familiar. There's the multicolored ICEE machine, hot dogs sizzling on a roller, and beer stacked in a walk-in refrigerator.

The retailer abandoned its 12,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Express concept last year, but it continues to test small store formats.

"We're eager for feedback from customers. We want to know what's working," said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Anne Hatfield.

The store, along with a similar one in Rogers, Ark., near Wal-Mart's Bentonville headquarters, opened last month. Both stores are in the parking lots of Wal-Mart Supercenters.

Wal-Mart's strategy seems to be not reinventing the convenience store concept but rather tweaking it.

The store's hot food section sells pizza, whole and by the slice, and on another bank of hot rollers are the "tornadoes," a knockoff of 7-Eleven's taquitos. Community coffee brand is sold from six taps, regular, decaf and flavored. There's a healthy selection with fruit cups, yogurt and "Market Side" branded salads and wraps, but no calorie counts on the labels.

The rectangle-shaped building sits in front of a row of 16 gasoline pumps, all under cover.

Wal-Mart also is working on a convenience store concept for its online grocery shoppers. Amazon also is testing a concept for online grocery pickup.

In December, one of these 4,000-square-foot stores with gasoline pumps opened in Thornton, Colo.

It's similar to one Wal-Mart opened a year ago in Huntsville, Ala. Inside, the standard coffee, soda and snacks are sold, but these stores include a drive-through for picking up online grocery orders.

Both convenience store concepts are tests, Hatfield said.

The convenience store business is not huge for a company Wal-Mart's size, but as a major seller of gasoline, its 100- and 200-square-foot payment kiosks may not offer enough for many of its customers.