Walmart plans to spend an estimated $77.4 million to upgrade its Tennessee stores this year, including remodeling its retail outlets in Dayton, Athens and a dozen other stores.
While 14 store buildings will be remodeled across the state, nearly every Walmart in Tennessee will also be getting new technologies and equipment for everything from floor cleaning to self-checkout services.
"Walmart stores in Tennessee have continued to make innovation in every store a priority in 2019," said Sean Riley, Walmart's regional general manager in Tennessee. "From new tools to help our associates do their jobs better to online grocery pickup and convenient Pickup Towers, Walmart's innovations are a part of our continued efforts to constantly improve the ways Tennesseans shop."
The Walmart in Ooltewah last year pioneered Tennessee's first "pickup tower" to let online shoppers pickup orders at the store faster. The 16-feet tall, high-tech vending machines are capable of fulfilling a customer's online order in less than a minute once they arrive at the store.
Neal Beeler, a co-manager for the 11-year-old Walmart Store in Ooltewah, said the store has also received a fast unloader last month that automatically scans and sorts items that come off Walmart trucks.
"This allows our associates to spend more time on the floor doing other tasks and being with customers and less time in the backroom unloading and sorting shipments," Beeler said.
The store also is one of 32 Walmart stores in the state to receive an autonomous floor scrubber that uses a map of the store to go up and down each aisle during the middle of the night cleaning and scrubbing the floor without anyone having to operate the device.
"We got these machines a couple of weeks ago and they have worked extremely well," Beeler said.
Over the past couple of years, Walmart has also begun giving its employees "check out with me" devices to allow employees to help customers check out anywhere in the store.
"These are very helpful in areas like garden centers where our associates can check out people in the outdoor flower area, for instance," without them having to go inside and go through a checkout counter," he said.
Beeler said the new technologies help save staff time, but have not cut employment at the stores.
"They just free us up to do other jobs and to spend more time with customers," he said.
While Walmart upgrades its existing stores in Tennessee, the world's biggest retailer has slowed the pace of new store additions. Walmart also closed one of its Knoxville stores on March 29 and will shut down a Morristown store next Friday as it pares unprofitable locations.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 757-6340.