Walmart Inc.

Sam Walton bought a Ben Franklin variety store franchise in Newport, Arkansas in 1945 after returning from World War II. He was 27 years old and borrowed $20,000 from his father-in-law. Walton became obsessed with retail operations — visiting competitors, talking to store managers, and implementing every improvement he could find. He grew the store's sales from $72,000 to $250,000 in three years. His landlord, recognising the store's success, refused to renew the lease and gave it to his son instead. Walton was forced to start over in a new town.

Sam Walton opened the first Walmart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas on July 2, 1962 — the same year Kmart and Target opened their first stores. Walton's insight was geographic: he targeted small towns that other retailers ignored, where there was no competition. His pricing strategy was radical: he passed every possible saving on to customers, operating on margins that competitors considered impossibly thin. Walton believed that a smaller margin on a much higher volume would generate more profit than a higher margin on lower volume. He was right.

Sam Walton made a bet with his CFO David Glass in 1983: if the company achieved an 8% pre-tax profit, Walton would dance the hula on Wall Street. The company hit its target. Walton, then 65 years old, wore a grass skirt and danced the hula on Wall Street in front of television cameras. The story, retold thousands of times, illustrated Walton's management philosophy: celebrate success, keep employees engaged, and never take yourself too seriously. Walton drove a beat-up 1979 Ford pickup truck to his stores until his death in 1992.

Walmart became the largest retailer in the United States in 1990, surpassing Sears and Kmart. The company's logistics and distribution infrastructure — pioneered by Walton and built over decades — gave Walmart cost advantages that competitors could not match. Walmart's information systems could track the sales of every product in every store in real time, allowing precise inventory management that reduced waste and ensured shelves were stocked. The technology investment was decades ahead of competitors.

Walmart launched Walmart.com in 2000 — and spent the following decade struggling to compete with Amazon in e-commerce. The company's physical store infrastructure, its greatest competitive advantage in retail, became a mixed blessing online: it had distribution centres optimised for bulk delivery to stores, not for shipping individual parcels to customers. Walmart spent billions acquiring e-commerce companies — including Jet.com for $3.3 billion — and building fulfilment infrastructure. By 2020, Walmart's U.S. e-commerce sales were growing at 70% annually. The competition with Amazon remained unresolved.