Walmart plans to more than double Alamance County distribution center

Walmart has filed plans to expand its Mebane distribution center with a 599,006-square-foot building that would sit beside the existing warehouse on Senator Ralph Scott Parkway. The new project would more than double the site’s size, add 450 jobs and push the combined footprint of the two facilities past one million square feet.

The expansion would build on Walmart’s first major Alamance County investment, announced in December 2013 as a more than $100 million perishable grocery distribution center that created 450 jobs. The original facility opened in July 2016, and state and local reporting at the time said it was designed to serve about 120 Walmart stores in North Carolina and surrounding states. Those jobs were expected to pay an average annual wage of $35,374 plus benefits.

The new building is described as a dry-goods distribution center and would be built in front of, to the west and right of, the existing Walmart complex in Mebane. That puts the project in the same logistics corridor that already handles tractor-trailers serving the current warehouse at 2837 Senator Ralph Scott Parkway. For Alamance County, the upside is straightforward: another large employer, more construction activity and a larger industrial tax base tied to one of the country’s biggest retailers.

The tradeoff is just as clear. A warehouse of this size means more truck movement, more wear on nearby roads and more pressure on traffic patterns around the Mebane site. The county and city have already seen how a major distribution center can reshape a corridor over time, from the first Walmart project in 2013 to the 2016 opening and now to a second facility that would expand the company’s footprint even further.

Walmart’s Mebane operations have become one of the county’s largest industrial presences, and the latest plan would deepen that footprint rather than add a small annex or warehouse bay. With the combined buildings set to top one million square feet, the proposal underscores how much economic weight warehouse development now carries in Alamance County, along with the traffic and land-use questions that come with it.