Walmart's Planned New Home Office Will Impress Even D-FW Corporate Dwellers, Developers

While Amazon was dizzying the world with its HQ2 search, Walmart was quietly mapping out plans for its HQ2 campus in its hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas.Walmart will build its new headquarters on 350 acres it already owns and where it's operated warehouses and office buildings for years.To put it in perspective of large North Texas projects, the planned headquarters is more than three times the size of Toyota North America's new Plano headquarters in Legacy West and it's five times the size of the new Charles Schwab campus in Westlake.Visitors are regularly shocked to see where the No. 1 company on the Fortune 500 list operates. It's a maze, but understandably so.Walmart was founded in 1962 and over the years on its way to becoming the world's largest retailer it added buildings, but mostly in a frugal fashion of founder Sam Walton. Think indoor outdoor carpeting, tiny executive offices, no frills lobbies and closet-size rooms for negotiating with streams of visiting suppliers.It's more recent expansions are nicer and include modern test kitchens, larger buildings, but still cumbersome for employees trying to connect and collaborate and to attract and retain new people.About 15,000 employees now work in 20 buildings spread out among huge expanses of parking lots. Newbies get lost. Visitors are late for meetings. It isn't the best environment for what Walmart CEO Doug McMillon says it is now, "people-led and tech-empowered."Walmart hasn't said how much the project will cost, but it did say doing it in phases means "the cost will be part of our annual budgeting process," said Walmart spokeswoman Anne Hatfield.  Continue reading...