Sam Walton was voted ‘most versatile boy’ when he graduated from university.
Wal-Mart, the all-conquering retail giant he founded, is now the most versatile brand in US retail and forerunner of the British equivalent Tesco.
Walton was born 1918 in Oklahoma and lived on a farm until his father returned to his former job as a farm loan appraiser. Pioneer of the ‘pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap’ strategy, Walton grew up amid the paucity of the Great Depression. As a youngster he supplemented the family income doing various jobs, including milking cows and delivering papers.
Dismayed by the scarcity of his formative years, Walton was prescient in sensing the stirrings of change when discount stores began opening nearby. He began opening Wal-Mart stores and undercut competitors by buying wholesale and cutting out middlemen.
Heralding the 24-hour society, he wrong-footed competitors by having longer opening hours. Given the tight margins inherent in discount retailing, sales needed to grow fast – and so they did.
Because stock turnover was rapid, so too was expansion; Walton was always thinking about the next store. From his plane, he would survey the landscape in search of the perfect intersection between towns – out-of-town retail was born.
As well as anticipating trends, Walton started them. In the 1960s, the one-time US Army Intelligence Corps captain used computers to revolutionise logistics and inventory management at his 20 stores, two decades before even the Sinclair Spectrum appeared. According to Time magazine, “Wal-mart’s computer database is second only to the Pentagon’s in capacity.”
Walton was also first to introduce profit sharing. Nevertheless, Wal-Mart is today often lambasted for paying low wages. As with Tesco, there are few things it wouldn’t sell, and it has been blamed for the decline of small retailers and, by extension, towns themselves. Yet by shopping at Wal-Mart stores in droves, people have tacitly sanctioned its market domination.
Sam Walton died in 1992, reportedly leaving a $100bn fortune to his wife and the legacy of the all-singing, all-dancing, discount superstore.
