Walmart closes Lincolnwood store as it opens two others

Walmart’s pickup-only store at 6840 North McCormick Boulevard in Lincolnwood closed on Feb. 17, 2023, and the company told affected associates they were eligible to transfer to other Walmart locations. For workers, the key detail was not just the shutdown itself, but the path out of it: Walmart said it would keep serving customers through surrounding stores and walmart.com, which meant the job changes would ripple through nearby locations rather than end the customer demand overnight.

The Lincolnwood site sat about a mile from a traditional Walmart store in Skokie, and Walmart said it would apply what it learned at the pickup prototype to pickup and delivery operations at surrounding stores. That matters for hourly associates and managers because a closure like this can shift traffic, returns, curbside pickups, and scheduling pressure to the next closest store. It can also create transfer openings for associates who want to stay with the company instead of taking a longer commute or starting over elsewhere.

The Lincolnwood closure was part of a larger Chicago-area reset. Walmart announced on Feb. 8, 2023 that it would close three Chicago-area locations, and later, on April 11, 2023, it said it would close four more Chicago stores: the Chatham Supercenter, Kenwood Neighborhood Market, Little Village Neighborhood Market, and Lakeview Neighborhood Market. Walmart said its Chicago stores had not been profitable since it entered the city nearly 17 years earlier, that they were losing tens of millions of dollars a year, and that annual losses had nearly doubled in the previous five years.

The company also said it had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Chicago, including $70 million over the prior couple of years for store upgrades, two Walmart Health facilities and a Walmart Academy training center. Even with those bets, Walmart said the business still had not turned around. For associates, that is the practical lesson from Lincolnwood: when Walmart closes a store, the company usually tries to keep workers in the system through transfers, shifts the customer load to nearby stores, and uses the closure to reconfigure the local network rather than walk away from the market entirely.