We are, thankfully, not very close to a Walmart Super Centre, but on the rare occasion, we do visit. The Supercentre is 9 km away. Yesterday, Wednesday midday, was such a day. . In summary, the Super Centre is larger with very slightly more variety, their food section is quite good, but their checkout process tortuous. Store location: Walmart Supercentre, Eglington/Warden, Toronto, Canada.
I am not usually an advocate of big for big’s sake, nor am I a huge advocate of Walmart. None the less, the Walmart Supercentre is like a regular Walmart with double or triple the inventory. More stuff, but only marginally more variety. While my local Walmart often runs out of products that I want to buy, and seems loath to reorder, this is less likely to happen at the Supercentre. Still, I was looking for badminton grip tape, which was out of stock at my local store, the Supercentre was also out of stock.
We walk and walk, and marvel at the acres of “Made in China” stuff. Wow. Ok, this is getting boring. Our local Walmart has the same exact stuff, with the same, exact prices.
The grocery area is the highlight of the store. If Walmart had a grocery store locally I’d definitely shop there. Prices were comparable or slightly lower than local grocers. This is a good thing. The variety of goods surpasses all my local grocers. This is a great thing. The grocery area is so large that we quickly ran out of time browsing aisle after aisle, so we bee lined it to our target.
The checkout was the downfall of this shopping experience. How about having 2 express lines (express lines are cashiers for customers with less than 10 items, we had 8), only to find they were 30 customers deep. One express line had 2 cashiers, and the other had 4 cashiers. There were also 4 other cashiers. It was like they quadrupled the size of the store, invited everyone to come shop and kept the same number of cashiers as my local Walmart. It took us 30 minutes to check out, longer than our shopping time.
Is it worthwhile to double the time for your shopping trip in order to save a very little money? My verdict is that a trip to the Walmart Supercentre is not worth the hassle of the lineup. The store was clean, well stocked, grocery area well laid out, but not enough to offset the time wasted lining up for a cashier. They do most everything right but take my money quickly enough.
It was faster waiting in the regular, non-express line. This is counter intuitive. We won’t be going back any time soon.
Shopping Experience Rating: C.
