The Walmarts are coming. Expect to see more and more Walmarts in town as the discount retailer makes a push into the Tucson market with a smaller store that will slide right underneath the city's big-box ordinance.

First on the list is a 91,000-square-foot store at the southeast corner of Golf Links and Houghton. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is in negotiations with developer David Williamson about the site and will soon submit a development plan to the city.

The store would be about half the size of one of the company's traditional supercenters — those massive mega-stores where you can buy clothes, groceries, tech gadgets, change your tires and get lost all in one place.

"The site at Golf Links and Houghton is a location that we are interested in," said Delia Garcia, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. "It's a grocery store. General merchandise and grocery to provide that value and convenience to our Tucson customers."

Garcia danced around calling the store a "supercenter," saying it technically is because it will have groceries and general merchandise, but it's also much smaller than other such stores. So instead, she described the project as "more of a really localized neighborhood kind of shopping experience."

OK. All I can picture is asphalt.

You can bet other similar-sized stores are in the works, too.

Valencia and Alvernon and El Con Mall are two contenders for smaller Walmarts that would glide underneath the big-box ordinance and its rules for stores 100,000 square feet or larger.

Garcia acknowledged the interest in both sites, but couldn't say anything further.

"At Alvernon as you mentioned, there is an opportunity there, potentially," she said. "There is a lot of speculation about El Con. We would be interested in serving that community."

On a local level, Wal-Mart needs the locations. Its store at Speedway and Kolb, which preceded the 1999 big-box ordinance, is extremely busy and stressed. There are plenty of Walmart customers who either fight through traffic to get to that location or turn around and head to Benson — yes, Benson — to buy their stuff.

"We know that customers from the southeast area are traveling to Benson and Green Valley and some are even going all the way over to Marana," Garcia said.

But this expansion push also comes at a time when Wal-Mart is rolling out smaller "neighborhood market" grocery stores.

Squeezed out of metro markets with big-box ordinances and looking to reshape its brand, Wal-Mart has turned to the smaller store as a way to gain market share, recent news reports have said.

"Wal-Mart does have a PR problem. Internal studies show 8 to 10 percent of Americans won't shop there for political reasons," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has written several books on the giant retailer. "Wal-Mart has been stymied in the last five years. It has not moved (substantially) into coastal California, Boston, New York or Chicago."

As a side note, Lichtenstein's recent (and critical) book, "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart created a Brave New World of Business," is a must-read for those interested in Wal-Mart's evolution from a discount shop in northwestern Arkansas to the world's largest retailer.

Lichtenstein said he's often wondered why Wal-Mart hadn't pursued the smaller-store concept simply as a way to get into certain metro markets.

"Wal-Mart has never figured out the smaller store," he said.

Well, here we are: downsized supercenters.

"I know it would certainly generate a lot of potential interest in the area from potential customers, and the city would benefit from potential taxes from the site," City Councilwoman Shirley Scott said of the prospect of this new, smaller Walmart in her ward.