Walmart planning to add over 150 new stores nationwide over next five years

National retail giant Walmart is planning to add more than 150 stores across the U.S. over the next five years, company CEO John Furner announced.

While some of the new stores will be smaller locations converted into larger “Supercenters” that offer groceries in addition to other goods, most will be newly built, company spokesperson Josh Havens told CNBC.

The first two stores under the initiative are “Neighborhood Markets,” the smallest variety of Walmart, and are slated to open in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, and Atlanta later this spring, Mr. Furner said.

Those two stores will be the first new Walmarts built in America in years, as the company has not opened a new U.S. store since 2021, a spokesperson told the Associated Press.

“We plan to build new stores in a way that we have not done in many years,” a Walmart spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

Walmart did not say how much the initiative is projected to cost or where the Supercenters will be located.

In the short term over the next 12 months, Walmart is finalizing construction plans for 12 new stores, converting a smaller Walmart location into a Supercenter, and remodeling 650 existing stores across 47 states and Puerto Rico, Mr. Furner said.