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In 1945, Sam Walton opened his first variety store and in 1962, he opened his first Wal-Mart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas. Now, Wal-Mart is expected to exceed “$200 billion a year in sales by 2002…(with current figures of) more than 100 million shoppers a week…(and as of 1999) it became the first (private-sector) company in the world to have more than one million employees.” Why? One reason is that Wal-Mart has continued “to lead the way in adopting cutting-edge technology to track how people shop, and to buy and deliver goods more efficiently and cheaply than any other rival.” Many examples exist throughout Wal-Mart’s history including its use of networks, satellite communication, UPC/barcode adoption and more. Much of the technology that was utilized helped Sam Walton more efficiently track what he originally noted on yellow legal pads. From the very beginning, he wanted to know what the customers purchased, what inventory was selling and what stock was not selling. Wal-Mart now “tracks on an almost instantaneous basis the ordering, shipment, and delivery of literally every item it sells, and that it requires its suppliers to hook into the system, enabling it to track most goods every step of the way from the time they’re made and packaged in the factories to when they’re carried out store doors by shoppers.” “Wal-Mart operates the world’s most powerful corporate computing system, with a capacity (as of late 1999) of more than 100 terabytes of data (A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, or roughly the equivalent of 250 million pages of text.). Only the U.S. government maintains a bigger database.” Sam Walton was eventually considered “the most influential retailer of the century, and with good reason, for nearly every great retailer of the coming years would follow his business examples.” Industrial Revolution: When the Industrial Revolution took place in the United States, factories were now able to out produce consumer demand. For the first time, these new goods needed new ways to be sold, new ways to get to the public. “In New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, the first department stores opened their doors. Railroads and telegraph wires snaked across the country, giving storekeepers a new way to order goods and get them on the shelves faster than ever before. A whole new industry sprang up to persuade people through advertisements with enticing pictures and clever slogans, to buy things they’d never known they needed, to turn America, in the phrase department store pioneer John Wanamaker, into the Land of Desire.” At the same time, large corporations became another “dominant form of business”, such as with U.S. Steel, Swift, R.J. Reynolds, and Procter & Gamble. Department stores such as Woolworth, Penney, Sears, A&P, and Kroger became known in the retail environment. Early Discount Approach: “The first small discount stores” started in the 1930s, developed in the years after WWII and really began to take off in the 1960s as “giant discount chains”. This is where Sam Walton’s first ideas of Wal-Mart evolve. Most large discount chains were within the average city limits. Walton decided to take a different approach and develop stores “in towns everybody else ignored as too small”. He had spent considerable time in rural Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri; he knew “that small-town folks craved all the wonderful goods promised by the consumer culture just as much” as the other consumers. He also knew that there was more business than most people expected with less competition in these small towns. As with most discount retailers, Walton would “take name-brand health and beauty aids (toothpaste, soap, shampoo, etc.) stack them high, and sell them at cost.
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