American retailer and entrepreneur, founder of Walmart and Sam's Club.
1918–1992 · Bentonville, Arkansas
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Samuel Moore Walton was born on March 29, 1918, in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, the elder son of Thomas Gibson Walton and Nancy Lee Lawrence Walton. His father worked in turn as a farmer, banker, farm loan appraiser, and insurance and real estate agent, and the Depression moved the family repeatedly through Oklahoma and Missouri before they settled in Columbia. Money was tight, and Walton worked from childhood: he milked the family cow and sold the surplus milk, built a newspaper route into a small business employing other boys, and sold magazine subscriptions. In the eighth grade he became the youngest Eagle Scout in Missouri's history to that date. At David H. Hickman High School in Columbia he quarterbacked the state championship football team and was voted Most Versatile Boy by his classmates. He paid his own way through the University of Missouri, waiting tables in exchange for meals and keeping his paper route, joined Beta Theta Pi, served as an ROTC cadet officer, and graduated in 1940 with a bachelor's degree in economics. Days later he joined J. C. Penney as a management trainee in Des Moines, Iowa, at $75 a month, and picked up the company habit of calling store workers associates rather than employees. He entered the Army in 1942, married Helen Robson on February 14, 1943, served stateside in the Army Intelligence Corps supervising security at aircraft plants and other defense facilities, and was discharged as a captain in 1945.
With $5,000 he had saved and $20,000 borrowed from his father in law, Leland Robson, Walton bought a Ben Franklin variety store franchise in Newport, Arkansas, on September 1, 1945. He cut prices below what the franchisor recommended, bought stock directly from jobbers to widen his margin, and drove annual sales from roughly $80,000 to $225,000 in five years, making it the best performing Ben Franklin in a six state region. Then came the lesson that shaped everything after it. His lease carried no renewal option, and in 1950 the landlord, P. K. Holmes, refused to renew so that his own son could take the store. Walton sold the inventory and fixtures for about $50,000 and started over in Bentonville, Arkansas, opening Walton's 5 & 10 on the town square on May 9, 1950, this time making certain of his hold on the real estate first. Through the 1950s Walton and his brother Bud built a chain of variety stores across Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. He learned to fly and bought a small plane so he could scout towns and store sites from the air. Convinced that deep discounting would work in the small towns the national chains ignored, and unable to persuade Ben Franklin's management to fund the idea, he risked his own money and opened Wal-Mart Discount City at 719 West Walnut Street in Rogers, Arkansas, on July 2, 1962. He was 44 years old. Expansion followed the warehouse rather than the map: Walmart saturated the territory within a day's drive of each distribution center before jumping to the next, which let a rural retailer build national scale on unusually low overhead. The company incorporated as Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. in 1969 and went public on October 1, 1970, offering 300,000 shares at $16.50 apiece, largely to retire the debt Walton had personally guaranteed. Going public did not change the culture, which stayed recognisably his. He called the workforce associates, extended profit sharing to them from 1971 and later stock purchase plans, opened store level numbers to managers, and ran a Saturday morning meeting at headquarters every week for decades. He drove a battered pickup around Bentonville, visited stores constantly, and copied good ideas from competitors without a trace of embarrassment. When associates beat his pretax profit target for 1983 he paid off a bet by dancing the hula in a grass skirt on Wall Street. He added the warehouse club format with the first Sam's Club in Midwest City, Oklahoma, in April 1983, and the combined grocery and general merchandise Supercenter in Washington, Missouri, in 1988, the same year he handed the chief executive role to David Glass and stayed on as chairman. By 1990 Walmart was the largest retailer in the United States.
Walton was treated for hairy cell leukemia in the 1980s and was later diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. On March 17, 1992, President George H. W. Bush traveled to Bentonville rather than summon him to Washington and presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in front of his associates; Walton called it the highlight of his entire career. Nineteen days later, on April 5, 1992, he died at University Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, aged 74, and was buried in Bentonville. He left 1,735 Walmart stores, 212 Sam's Clubs, and 13 Supercenters, some 380,000 associates, and annual sales approaching $50 billion. His autobiography, written with the journalist John Huey and finished in his final months, reached bookstores within weeks of his death. The company he started on a town square kept compounding after him, becoming the largest company in the world by revenue and the largest private employer on earth, and the fortune it generated made his heirs one of the wealthiest families in history. His method, everyday low prices funded by relentless expense control, logistics treated as the core product, ownership shared with front line workers, and a bias toward copying whatever worked, became the template for modern mass retail. Critics argue with equal force that the same method hollowed out main street merchants and held retail wages down. Walton himself always insisted the answer was plainer than either his admirers or his detractors made it: buy well, keep costs below the competition's, give the customer more than they expect, and stay close enough to the sales floor to hear what is actually happening.
“There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody by spending his money somewhere else.”
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
“The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.”
“Every time Wal-Mart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customers' pockets.”
“If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.”
“I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.”
“Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton
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