In Bentonville, 'all roads lead back to Walmart'

About five minutes into the drive from Northwest Arkansas National Airport in Bentonville, the contours of Walmart's local influence begin to take shape.

After passing acres of pastures and seemingly endless amounts of undeveloped land, distribution centers and warehouses emerge along the sides of Highway 12 as long-haul freight and smaller semitrucks emblazoned with the global retailer's logo begin to dominate the two-lane thoroughfares.

Suddenly, as if opening a surprise pop-up book, Walmart's new corporate campus springs up against an otherwise flat backdrop of single-story buildings and unobstructed skies. While work on the expansive development is still underway, the collection of recently and soon-to-be constructed buildings signals big changes to a town where the combined population of cows and Walmart stores may exceed its 55,000-plus human one.

The campus is rising adjacent to Bentonville's longtime downtown, but once completed, civic leaders said it will effectively become the city's new center.

The yearslong corporate real estate project is intended to meld with the rest of fast-growing Bentonville and serve as an anchor for the Arkansas city that's aiming to shed its rural perception.

Construction on the multi-billion-dollar development is nearing the finish line. The new offices are designed to be integrated next to local shops, museums and restaurants, creating a literal place for employees to live, work and play that also welcomes the rest of the community.

"We wanted it so that there really isn't a separation from the growing and urban development in Bentonville to what we have here," Seth Roy, Walmart's director of campus construction, told CoStar News on a recent tour of the sprawling project. "This goes beyond what a lot of other companies have done with their own headquarters and local presence."

Since its founding in the early 1960s, Walmart's own meteoric growth has trickled down to its Arkansas hub, bolstering the residential real estate market and spurring the development of new hotels and restaurants that cater to the streams of people who work for, or do business with, the company.

"Walmart is the anchor for our economy and at the core of how our community has developed," Brandom Gengelbach, CEO of the Greater Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce, told CoStar News. "It has created a whole ecosystem here."

Serving as ground zero for that growth: Walmart's sprawling 350-acre headquarters expansion, a multiphased development that marks the largest corporate investment in Arkansas' history.

The project, which the world's largest company calls its Home Office, has shifted Bentonville's center of gravity. Once completed later this year, the new campus is set to span more than 20 buildings and include an outdoor amphitheater, more than 40 miles of biking trails and a slew of amenities that rival a high-end resort.

Walmart isn't the first corporate giant aiming to create a live-work-play atmosphere that subconsciously blends an employee's personal and professional lives. Yet unlike Amazon in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood or Apple in California's Silicon Valley, the retailer's future campus isn't just for its workers. Local officials are banking on its ability to anchor future growth for Bentonville's broader economy.

"A lot of corporate campuses have a walled-off feel with a contained environment and accessibility that's limited to employees," Gengelbach said. "It all feels very hidden and it's harder to connect with businesses that way. Here it's completely different, with everything as an opportunity that opens up the campus to the rest of the community."

The company is set to complete construction on at least one office building each month through the remainder of the year for a total of 12 that will house its more than 15,000 employees based in and around the area, a figure that represents a significant slice of Bentonville's total population.

A 153-room AC Hotel by Marriott recently made its debut, and about 55,000 square feet of ground-floor retail will soon be filled with a mix of locally based tenants. The on-site Little Squiggles child care center is open to the public, as is the campus' visitor center that is stocked with Walmart-branded Stanley Cups and eponymous blue polos.

After spending years helping to develop Apple's iconic Silicon Valley headquarters, Walmart's Roy knew exactly what the retailer would need to create an environment that almost seamlessly blends life at work with life outside of it.

Since he was brought on in the late master-planning stage in 2019, Roy has orchestrated conversations with state and local officials to help design a blueprint for "a winning workplace" for Walmart that doubles as a diversified downtown for Arkansas.

"We wanted to design a campus that was tech-enabled, sustainable and one where associates could not only do better than great work, but also thrive in the environment," Roy told CoStar News from a Sam Walton Hall conference room in the heart of the sprawling development.

Inside the mass timber offices, employees are surrounded by hundreds of square feet of electrochromic-view glass that helps distribute light and heat. Innovation centers and social clubs within the buildings create environments that underscore the company's commitment to in-person work.

Modularly constructed buildings meant the development team was able to deploy Walmart's corporate "Save Money, Live Better" tagline. Outside, Roy said half of the campus is dedicated to natural space with 750,000 plantings, the greenway, and multiple lakes that also help with stormwater retention.

A driving theme for Roy and Walmart's development plans was to create an environment with impacts that last far beyond the project's completion, the most important of which is further establishing the company's role as Bentonville's primary growth driver.

"One of the responsibilities we took on was to have our retail offerings complement the restaurants and other businesses in Bentonville so that we draw that public in," Roy said of prioritizing the project's integration with the rest of the city.

Until now, downtown Bentonville's nucleus has been an open square that a person of normal fitness could run from one end to the other in about 30 seconds.

The primary South Main Street drag is a Hallmark movie come to life, with quaint storefronts that sell artisanal teas and have cutesy names like Butter-Scotch for the hybrid bakery and bar. Parents and their toddlers walk around with ice cream cones from the area's multiple parlors, and bicyclists whiz by on their way to one of the entry points for the Slaughter Pen Trail.

Walmart is filling in the gaps, expanding the town into an economic force.

The Walmart museum, reopened to the public in early March, has a prominent spot overlooking the square. A Neighborhood Market outpost is one of the only grocers for several miles and hosts Walmart's experimental products, displays and store operations. The founding Walton family name is scattered across storefronts, trailheads and "sponsored by" signs, stamps that serve as a quiet reminder of the company's driver-seat role in its local economic development.

"Oh Walmart is everything around here," said Songmin Han, a guest service supervisor at the Motto by Hilton Bentonville Downtown, a hotel that opened last year. The 175-room property was developed through a real estate venture spearheaded by two third-generation Waltons, constructed in large part to cater to the revolving door of hopeful entrepreneurs, visiting associates and anyone else the company continuously attracts to its hometown to help keep hotels such as the Motto at near-full occupancy.

"Especially Monday through Friday, we're almost always fully booked," Han said, looking out at a lobby that, even on an early Wednesday afternoon, was bustling with people fine-tuning presentations and working behind laptops. "Everything about this city runs on Walmart."

Walmart's emphasis on in-person work echoes a sentiment rippling across corporate America that has resulted in a renewed effort to get employees back to the office.

Companies such as Amazon, Starbucks, JPMorgan Chase and IBM have escalated their attendance policies in recent months, with many now requiring workers to commute to a physical hub up to five days a week. Those mandates have meant many employers are investing in nicer offices or expanding to ensure they have enough real estate to accommodate an in-person workforce.

Walmart, though it has closed several satellite offices in an effort to concentrate its workforce around three major hubs in Bentonville, the San Francisco Bay Area and New York, has also signed several blockbuster leases on the West Coast over the past year to bolster its portfolio of high-quality office space.

Office real estate has taken a central role in aiding employers' arguments for in-person work, with companies increasingly prioritizing space in the nicest, newest properties to better alleviate workers' indignation about returning to the office.

For Walmart, starting with a blank canvas for its Bentonville campus has made it all the easier to develop a commute-worthy environment that revolves around and supports associates' day-to-day lives.

"We are better when we're together," Walmart's Roy said. "That was a central theme before the pandemic and it's still true today, and it's why we have been trying to get all our home-office folks operating out of this area. There was a little wave of public perception with remote work and everything else, but we are an in-person company."

Even with months to go before the campus is fully open to its associates, weekday activity across Walmart's future headquarters is bustling.

As pieces of the campus have made their debut, associates earlier this year took advantage of a temporary break in Arkansas' winter weather to bike along the Razorback Greenway trail, host meetings at one of the many outdoor lounges and walk to 8th & Plate, the on-campus food hall with 12 venues and an underground kitchen facility with subsidized pricing that rivals Costco's hot-dog special.

Yet the clearest sign of Walmart's attempts to strike the right work-life balance is across the street at the Walton Family Whole Health & Fitness.

The 360,000-square-foot wellness facility is a supersized take on a local recreation center that includes state-of-the-art equipment, an indoor running track, fitness and nutrition classes, multiple pools, indoor and outdoor tennis and pickleball courts, cryotherapy services, an activity center for kids, and even a meditation garden.

The amenity center opened last year as the first component of the campus expansion. It has since become the primary hub for associates and their families at any point of the day.

The center "is part of a whole-health journey that helps our associates thrive at and beyond work," said Raven Washabaugh, Walmart's senior manager of global communications and corporate affairs.

As the world's largest retailer with more than $650 billion in annual revenues, both Walmart and Bentonville heads expect the new headquarters to be the top selling point in the ongoing campaign to lure talent to what has largely been written off as a sleepy rural backwater.

"The work the Walton family started recognized that, for us to be successful as a community and for businesses to want to stay and thrive here, quality of place had to be the number one priority," Gengelbach said. "That focus has laid the foundation and made it possible for the city to leverage our other assets like the outdoors, our recreation and all of the other benefits that are now being carried through the rest of Walmart's campus. It will set the stage for our future growth."

Already, that growth has translated into projections that Bentonville's population is on track to climb to more than 1 million people by 2050. The city is preparing for growth through a mix of land-use and planning strategies aimed at supporting that future expansion.

"You face diluting the city's charm with growth, and that's been the key for what Walmart has done at its campus," the economic development CEO said. "What they've done and are doing has been at the core of our efforts, but we're also focused on having a center of gravity that complements and is in addition to Walmart, not just Walmart itself."

Even so, Gengelbach acknowledges that "all roads lead back to Walmart," and that its campus expansion plans are unlike anything Bentonville — or even the state of Arkansas — has seen before.

As Walmart puts the finishing touches on its remaining buildings and associates gradually relocate to populate them, company executives, local businesses and community officials expect the campus to propel the region to a higher spot on the global real estate stage.

"Looking around, it's hard to believe that we're not in Silicon Valley or New York City," Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at the unveiling of Walmart's new campus in mid-January. "I think it's safe to say that Arkansas has never had a development project like this ever before and probably ever again."