New York: Take that Amazon. Walmart is doubling down on its hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas.

A week after Amazon announced, with great fanfare, that it is planning to build a second headquarters in a city offering the best perks, Walmart said that it is replacing its ageing headquarters in Bentonville with a new one.

In a note to employees, Walmart’s chief executive, Doug McMillon, said the company’s current corporate campus — a hodgepodge of more than 20 buildings spanning several communities — are “significantly beyond their shelf life”.

The new home office, centered on 350 acres, will be better suited to a more “digitally native work force,” he said. “You’ll see improved parking, meal services, fitness, and natural light — yes, natural light,” McMillon wrote.

Walmart’s current office in Bentonville was built by the company’s founder, Sam Walton, in 1971, but as the company has grown into the nation’s largest private employer with 1.5 million workers in the US, it has had to add buildings to house its many employees. The construction of the new headquarters, which will house up to 17,000 employees, will take place over the next five to seven years.

Walmart has not yet calculated the cost. A Walmart spokesperson said that when thinking about the need for a new headquarters, the company did not consider moving to another city. Walmart’s loyalty to Bentonville contrasts with Amazon’s decision to build a second headquarters outside its home office in Seattle, setting off a bidding war among American cities.

The two companies have waged an increasingly fierce competition to dominate the retail industry. More than a dozen cities and states have already publicly expressed their interest in wooing Amazon to town, with some using stunts aimed at making their bids stand out from the fray.

Southwestern Corridor, an economic development group for southern Arizona, loaded a 21-foot-tall Saguaro cactus onto a flatbed truck bound for Seattle and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, to underscore Tucson’s interest in bringing Amazon’s second headquarters to the city.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, posted a 90-second video extolling the virtues of the nation’s capital. The video included some product placement, including Amazon’s Echo smart speaker and a copy of The Washington Post, which Bezos personally owns.