Walmart Canada has completed a $14.5 million renovation to its Toronto Dufferin Mall Supercentre which expands its Grocery Pickup service, launches its Express Pickup service and provides a wider assortment and other new services for customers.
“Our customers have been waiting for this and there’s been tremendous feedback so far,” said Store Manager Maksim Bozic. “They can’t believe what they’re seeing with the new upgrades and changes to improve the shopping experience. The store looks bright, organized, and refreshed. We have ready-to-eat rotisserie chickens and samosas, a new sushi bar and a fresh in-store bakery for all to enjoy. The response from our customers has been very positive.”
Walmart has expanded its Grocery Pickup service with 150 slots available daily with plans to expand to about 900 slots. The renovated store is also one of 28 Walmart locations that launched a time-saving Express Pickup service, a new premium option that provides customers with online grocery orders for pickup in two hours or less.
Key features of the renovated store include:
- A new fresh bakery, sushi bar, and other ready-to-eat food options such as rotisserie chickens and samosas;
- The international food aisle is now larger with an expanded assortment available;
- Fresh food has been moved to the side of the store under new signage and lighting;
- Newly upgraded front entrance, self-checkout area, and dairy and frozen sections.
“Walmart has been here serving the community for 28 years when Walmart came to Canada and we’re the closest Walmart store to downtown Toronto. There’s nobody else but us pretty much in the heart of the city,” said Bozic.
He said the retailer has turned its focus on the online side of the business.
“We’re looking to go to 500 (online) orders in the next four months by end of May and then we have a capacity of 900 to 1,200 orders per day,” added Bozic. “It’s part of the grocery pickup but the good thing with Walmart Canada is we offer also general merchandise.”
Over the past year, Walmart Canada has made approximately 70,000 items available for customers to pick up.
“Express Pickup, we launched at this location (recently). It’s in-store pickup but you can order your order an hour ahead and pretty much the same hour, two hours you’ll get your order,” he said. “If you need something right away, you place your order, you get one personalized shopper, Walmart associate, that does your full order for you, they pick it up, they get it ready, you come to the store, you use our apps we have, and in a matter of two to five minutes the order will be delivered to your car. It can be general merchandise items as well.”
The two level store at Dufferin Mall is a two-level location with 143,000 square feet. It has 420 staff currently with expansion possibly to 500 as it progresses with online orders, said Bozic.
“At this moment we have about 28 open positions to hire different areas of the building – the front end, the fresh, overnight, online associates to help us pick those orders. We’re creating quite a few careers.”
Walmart Canada came to the country in 1994 and operates a chain of more than 400 stores nationwide serving 1.5 million customers each day with more than 100,000 staff. The Dufferin store was one of its first locations in Canada.
The Dufferin Mall Supercentre is the closest Walmart Canada store to downtown Toronto and it’s designed to be a delivery hub. The store has its own delivery vehicles, which includes a new van that was recently added to the fleet.
The renovation is part of the company’s $3.5-billion investment aimed to generate significant growth and to make the online and in-store shopping experience simpler, faster and more convenient for Walmart customers. That includes renovating more than 150 stores – more than one-third of Walmart Canada’s store network, said the retailer.
Vendors in the Dufferin location includes a minutekey, Western Union, Naoki Sushi, Walmart Pharmacy, Walmart Photo Centre, Walmart Vision Centre, Walmart Wireless and Walmart Financial ATM. A new McDonald’s will be located inside the store, which is expected to open in the Spring.
Bozic said the company’s philosophy is to take care of its customers.
“Because this is the closest to the downtown, we felt it was important that we make this store is 100 per cent what the customer is looking for,” he said. “The focus is on the online business but also we cannot forget that we have folks who come into our store and they want to feel, they want to see what we have.”
Although Walmart has been getting better with their store renos – makes me miss Target 😀 Their physical store experience was also was on point.
So you’d say that Target… hit the bullseye?
I hear what you’re saying. Still, I worked for Target Canada from start to finish and was well aware of the many customer complaints about the store layouts. It wasn’t reported on at the time, but based on public response the company was testing and considering major store redesigns – the two-level stores in particular.
Are you allowed to go on record/provide info if we did a story about this?