Yeah but why temporarily? If they were old or unprofitable then shut them down period; it's not like they haven't done that before. And I'm not discounting your notion that Walmart is trying to send a message to someone, but who? The one thing that is sure is that the plumbing excuse is BS.
I agree the plumbing thing just won’t hunt. It could be that they avoid the ongoing publicity of announcing a store closing and going through the usual 60 or so days of shutdown. A plumbing problem they just shut down and worry about moving out the inventory etc later. Its over and hopefully people forget about it. Store closings are bad for stock prices.