Wal-Mart hiring for new grocery outlets

Wal-Mart is about to take a bigger bite of Chattanooga’s grocery market by getting smaller — at least in the size of its typical store.

The world’s biggest retailer said Thursday is has begun hiring the first of 95 employees who will staff Wal-Mart’s new 42,000-square-foot Neighborhood Market store being built in Dalton, Ga., which will open sometime this fall. Wal-Mart is already training workers for a similar-sized supermarket that will open next month in East Brainerd and is preparing to add other new Neighborhood Markets later this year in East Ridge, Hixson and Middle Valley.

Wal-Mart opened the first of its local grocery-only Neighborhood Market stores in Fort Oglethorpe in January.

The new stores are only about one-fourth as big as Wal-Mart’s superstores, which already have captured a major share of what Chattanoogans spend on grocery items with 16 such stores within a 30-mile radius of Chattanooga.

The $4.4 million Neighborhood Market store on Walnut Avenue in Dalton is being built in the Bry-Man’s Plaza shopping center on the site of what was once a Winn-Dixie grocery store. According to store manager Allan Rittenhouse, the store will be hiring both fulland part-time associates and is taking applications at the Walnut Square Mall.

“Wal-Mart is a company with many opportunities for professional growth, and we are excited about finding wonderful new associates to join us,” Rittenhouse said in a statement Thursday.

The majority of new associates will begin work in September to help prepare the store for its grand opening.

Wal-Mart introduced its grocery-only stores under the Neighborhood Market brand in 1998. Such stores typically stock about 28,000 grocery items, employ from 80 to 100 workers and are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In the Chattanooga area, the stores are being developed by Polestar Development, a subsidiary of the Chattanooga-based Hutton Co.

Contact staff writer Dave Flessner at dflessner @timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6340.