Palm Coast Walmart Will Build 10

Palm Coast's Walmart in the heart of the city has submitted a site plan to build a 10-pump gas station and convenience store that will take up a substantial portion of the parking lot at that store.

The 10-pump station will be located in the northwest corner of the parking lot, toward the corner of the property along Cypress Point Parkway and Cypress Edge Drive. The convenience store will be a 1,621-square-foot building that will face the pump island, its back facing the entrance of the Walmart store. The area parceled off from the parking lot will total 26,000 square feet. The entire Walmart property, including the building, totals 1 million square feet, or 23 acres. The Walmart store itself is about 180,000 square feet. The Melbourne-based Bowman Consulting Group, a commercial property developer, submitted the site plan to Palm Coast around the same time that it submitted a similar plan to St. Johns County, where Walmart is planning a slightly smaller, eight-pump gas station and convenience store in the Walmart Supercenter parking lot at 2355 U.S. 1 in St. Augustine. Walmart has been building and operating gas stations in its parking lot for many years, though it has itself operated them (after using a different vendor before that) since 2016.

There are several gas stations around Walmart.

There is a Circle K gas station catercorner from the Walmart parking lot's future location of its own gas station. The city does not project a decline in business for surrounding gas stations, nor does it see the proposed gas station as a traffic problem. To the contrary: "That actually relieves traffic," Jason DeLorenzo, the city's chief of staff, said. "A trip that came to the Circle K and a trip to the Walmart are two trips through an intersection. A trip to a gas station in the parking lot of the Walmart is one trip: I went to the Walmart and I got gas. That relieves traffic. That doesn't add traffic."

There is also somewhat of a lessening demand on parking spaces as customers have taken to Walmart's pick-up service as the company has expanded its online commerce, which allows for ordering ahead and having the merchandise delivered to one's car, eliminating the need to navigate the store's sprawling island. Like the northeast corner of the huge parking lot, the area slated for the gas station tends to see filled parking spaces taper off, the further away they get from the store's entrances. There does not appear to be any plans afoot to add electric-vehicle charging stations.

Walmart stock this week was trading at an all-time high of $85 a share, more than doubling in less than two years. The company operates more than 10,500 stores in 19 countries, employing 2.1 million people, with sales of $642.6 billion last year, $441 billion of that in stores in the United States and Puerto Rico. according to its latest annual report.