Wal-Mart opens three-story store in Los Angeles

The world's largest company, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Bentonville, Ark., has debuted a three-story urban prototype at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles. The site is located in the heart of the inner-city Crenshaw District, one of the city's most underserved regions. The building, and eye-pleasing Art Deco circa 1947, is the former home of an underperforming Macy's West store that closed in 1998, two years after it had been converted from a Broadway store. On Wal-Mart's opening day, the store attracted an estimated 1,500 shoppers, mostly African Americans and Hispanics, in the opening hours. The 150,000-sq.-ft. store, which joins Sears, Robinsons-May and the Magic Johnson Theaters at plaza anchors, is the first U.S. three-story unit and only one of a handful of stores that are connected to a shopping mall.