Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart, an American retailer was founded 40 years ago by Sam Walton. He opened his first Wal-Mart store, in Rogers, Arkansas on 2 July 1962. He was 44 at that time.

Initially, Sam Walton set up traditional retail outlets with relatively high prices. But then on he sought to drive out unnecessary costs wherever he could, all with the aim of bringing prices down.

Since Walton was operating on small profit margins he appreciated the need for growth. If you are not going to make much on each item you had better sell a lot of them. Walton would fly around America literally looking at the land below. When he saw a piece of property that was fairly near to a few small towns he would land the plane, buy the property and order a new Wal-Mart to be built.

Compared to most city centre supermarkets Wal-Mart stores are enormous and offer an extremely wide range of goods: everything from food to mobile phones, CDs, prams, paint, cameras, tools, bikes and so on. Wal-Mart stores have now become something of a national institution in America.

Sam Walton not only brought about the dominance of low-price stores in America, he also appreciated the importance of information technology very early. In the late 1960s he visited IBM to find the best person he could, hired him and got him to computerise Wal-Mart’s operations. Nowadays Wal-Mart’s computer database is second only to the Pentagon’s in capacity.

In the 30 years before his death in 1992 Walton built an empire that turned him into the wealthiest man in America and led the way in retailing worldwide. There are now over 1,700 Wal-Mart stores in the USA. Wal-Mart also has over 1,000 stores outside America. Its profits last year were an astonishing $6bn and the company’s market value was over $260bn. Wal-Mart became the biggest company in the world in terms of sales.