• Financial Times , Wednesday, September 10, 2008 10:18 AM

Wal-Mart has applied for a liquor license for a small Marketside store that is planned as part of a retail development in Oceanside, a coastal city north of San Diego. The location, still awaiting planning approval, will be just two miles from a recently opened Tesco Fresh & Easy store in the neighboring city of Vista. The retailer has also leased a 12,000-square-foot space in a new condominium development in a rapidly gentrifying area in downtown San Diego.

Wal-Mart is starting to explore alternative growth strategies in the U.S. as the growth of its network of highly profitable Supercenters starts to approach saturation point. San Diego became a focus of this struggle two years ago when the city council passed a bill that would have stopped the development of new Supercenter stores within the city limits. The mayor subsequently vetoed the bill.

Wal-Mart continues to describe its Marketside format as a pilot, although it has indicated in job advertisements that if successful it could open more than 1,000 of the stores and create more than $10 billion in sales.

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