Towards the back of the store is the clothing department, which shows off perhaps this store's most unusual feature -- this is the only Airport Walmart I know of that still has vinyl flooring! Walmart got serious about pushing every store to get bare concrete floors in the Airport era (if not earlier), so this would seem to indicate the floors in this store were too bad for even Walmart's standards, and considering the terrible flooring I've seen in some other oddball Walmarts, that's really saying something. (Meanwhile, Kroger appears to simplify things by having no standards! 😉) Even more surprisingly, it appears that Airport has its own, darker, style of woodgrain flooring for the clothing section, despite hardly any Airport stores actually having woodgrain flooring.
Perhaps Walmart rightly accepted that this location's floors were never intended to be seen by the public and decided that flooring cover was the best option. Kroger does this at times, but they are inconsistent about it.
ReplyDeleteAll of the newer decor Walmarts around here have concrete floors. It some cases, that meant pulling up the halfway decent early Project Impact fake wood. I remember when Walmart started to use that and it felt quite higher end, by Walmart standards at least. What they use now looks even lower end than anything Walmart had used before! Oh well, I don't shop there much and they give me little reason to reconsider that decision.
I've seen significantly worse floors at Kroger stores (specifically Fred Meyers) than I've ever seen at Walmart, so I'm surprised there are some stores that are so bad that even they still use vinyl flooring! Around here, basically every Kroger-owned store has either concrete floors or very old vinyl -- I can't remember any that got new vinyl anytime recently. (Though Fred Meyer does still typically have carpeted clothing departments!)
DeleteYeah, the woodgrain floors Walmart used to use were pretty nice. I still think Airport is nicer decor than any other mainstream Walmart package, but the terrible floors in a lot of stores definitely let it down!