In 2013, Walmart left a Cleveland Heights location in Ohio to move less than two miles up the road to a new shopping plaza in South Euclid. In 2007, in neighboring Streetsboro, Ohio, Walmart built a 224,000 square foot building, only to move 4,000 feet away just a few years later to an even bigger location. In 2014, a Walmart in St. Anthony, Minnesota ended its 20-year lease 11 years early when it closed and reopened 2.8 miles away in nearby Roseville with a larger, 152,000 square foot building. And soon, Walmart will be building a supercenter in nearby Blaine, Minnesota, in a new, larger building and less than two miles away from an already existing Walmart.

Similar moves have been made across the United States from Wisconsin to Florida to Alabama. In all instances, the new locations sold groceries, while the original stores did not.

And whenever Walmart moves, it leaves behind property.

Walmart has a lot of abandoned locations. So many, in fact, that Walmart has its own realty division. Al Norman, a land-use activist based in Massachusetts and author of Occupy Walmart, says retail giants, and in particular, Walmart, “have a history of abandoning perfectly usable facilities to build another store down the street or across the road.” Norman says this is a result of the company’s focus switching in the mid-90s when it decided to build more “supercenters,” the term used for Walmarts with grocery divisions.

In an interview with the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis, said that this practice of seeing “Walmart abandoning stores that in many cases are not that old and moving down the street or a mile down the road to build a new supercenter… is now the norm.”

I emailed Chris Buchanan, the director of public affairs and government relations for Walmart Stores. Buchanan said that most of these vacant “buildings are still being paid for, at least until the building’s lease is up,” which prevents new retailers from coming in and in some cases, saving the area.

But even when the property is available to lease, finding a replacement to move into an abandoned Walmart location is difficult. Most of Walmart’s buildings are built to spec, and according to Mitchell, most retailers don’t need a space that exceeds 100,000 square feet. This results in empty football fields of boxed-concrete left littered across the country.

In Tampa, Walmart moved less than two miles away to open its new supercenter — a building that can now sell food, thanks to 200,000 square feet of new shelving space. The old building, which had just 120,000 square feet, is closed, and remains empty. After Walmart’s departure, employees of neighboring businesses felt an immediate, negative impact.

A 2012 detailed study by the Universtity of Chicago, Loyola University, and the Chicago Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, concluded that the effect Walmart has on surrounding smaller businesses can be, and often times is always, devastating: