Wal-Mart debuts farm store - Country Farms, Kirksville, Missouri

Discount Store News, May 17, 1993 by Rich Halverson

KIRKSVILLE, Mo. -- Wal-Mart is hedging its bets with the recent opening of its Country Farms test store here. The discounter is offering a wide selection of merchandise for the home and garden that customers can find in conventional Wal-Mart stores, as well as goods for the farm business customer.

Indeed, it calls Country Farms a farm, home and garden store.

Based on observations of the Kirksville test unit, it appears that:

* Wal-Mart is focusing on the farmer as a businessman, offering $1,700 pieces of farm equipment, for example, along with a wide range of refrigerated vaccines to treat cow, hog and horse ailments;

* Country Farms (CF) offers some farm store innovations, such as a Market Quote Board, so farmers can check commodity prices, a conference room that 4H clubs can use for meetings and a small engine parts and service center;

* CF has moved up to higher price points, such as to Snapper and Husqvarna riding mowers and garden tractors, from its standard make, Murray;

* Some of the garden and home merchandise overlaps goods that conventional Wal-Marts offer;

* Country Farms is avoiding any association with its parent, saying nothing in signage or promotions that links the two and carrying none of the Wal-Mart private label products, such as Sam's American Choice Potting Soil and Ol' Roy dog food;

* The farm store reflects, though, the Wal-Mart low price philosophy, boasting in store signage that "Low Prices Come Home to the Farmer."

Giving a down-home look, price signs are hand-lettered.

If the test concept succeeds--and Wal-Mart spokesman Don Shinkle has said in previous statements that Country Farms is a one-store test--Wal-Mart will have found yet another way to recycle old stores that it is replacing with larger stores, either discount stores or SuperCenters.

Already, Wal-Mart has converted 70 old stores into Bud's Warehouse Outlets, which operate as closeout units.

Last year, Wal-Mart replaced the 70,000-sq.-ft unit that is now the farm store with a 188,000-sq.-ft. SuperCenter in the same town.

Accordingly, the Country Farms store provides Wal-Mart with an opportunity to test different merchandising strategies for the same goods it carries, say, in the Kirksville SuperCenter, as well as an opportunity to tap a new category, farm equipment, that it had been edging into in Midwest Sam's Clubs.

Illustrating the range of merchandise, from the decorative to the utilitarian, a Country Farms shopper can buy a $268.96 cast-concrete bird bath and fountain to decorate his garden, along with an all-purpose, 6-inch plow, $438.42.

To beautify their decks, the store offers a huge selection of $8.96 hanging baskets of flowering plants, as well as a vaccine to treat cows for pink eye.

Storefront signage, however, emphasizes the farm part of the merchandising equation: "Tractor Parts" and "Feed & Seed."

In the grand opening circular, store manager Archie Fetters noted that he and most store associates come from farm backgrounds. Consequently, Country Farms is focusing on the farmer as a business person, Fetters wrote, although the store is intended for do-it-yourselfers, small contractors, farm families and gardeners, as well.

These are a few examples of farm merchandise:

* Rubbermaid means a 300-gallon stock watering tank at $158.97;

* A mannequin means a plastic cast of a horse displaying a horse blanket;

* For $1,699.99, customers have the choice of a Filson automatic squeeze chute or a portable calf creep, 140-bushel capacity;

* 6-ft. rotary cutter, $599.92;

* Paul Cattle scale, 3,000 pound capacity, $349.

At the small engine repair and service center, which runs catty corner across the right rear corner, customers can buy, for instance, a 5 HP Briggs & Stratton Quantum engine for $199. As a customer amenity, the parts counter has four stools for those waiting for service, and a nearby counter offers free coffee.

On the home and garden side of the merchandise mix, the store carries merchandise that overlaps goods at conventional Wal-Marts, such as Brinkmann's new Smoke 'N Pit charcoal cooker, $236.96, and a tapered cedar, half-barrel planter at $14.96, the same price as in the Toms River, N.J., Wal-Mart.

To merchandise spring green goods, the store adopted the same approach as conventional Wal-Marts, erecting temporary greenhouses in its parking lot.

They carry many of the same types of bedding plants and vegetables and ornamental shrubs as do Wal-Mart stores, including shade trees in 5-gallon sizes.

In another difference, at least from East Coast Wal-Marts, the farm store carries a large selection of ornamental garden statuary, such as dogs, deer and geese, as well as ornamental bird baths, planters and urns at prices up to $300.

In front of the store are parked some of the 20 or so skus CF offers in four makes of garden tractors and riding mowers, such as the MTD 18 HP mower with a 46-inch cut.

But besides MTD, a standard discounter brand, CF also carries Husqvarna, Yard-Man and Snapper mowers. Its small engine repair service gives it the ability to move into higher priced makes that servicing dealers normally carry.