Sam Walton biography
Founder of Wal-Mart
The Sam Walton biography. If there were an award for retailer of the twentieth century, Sam Walton would probably have won it. With
his Wal-Mart stores, he made discount shopping available to small-town America and in the process became a very wealthy man.
He was born on March 29, 1918 near to Kingfisher, Oklahoma. Growing up through the Depression and having had to help financial ends
meet helped him to develop an understanding of the potential scarcity of money. This would help him when he later opened a department
store in Newport, Arkansas of the Butler Brothers chain. In this store he learned many of the practices he applied in Wal-Mart. When
his lease expired for the store expired, the owner did not want to renew it because he wanted to give the store to his son. So Sam
sold out and moved to Bentonville, Arkansas.
Here he opened a new store and by 1962, he and his brother had 16 stores. Then, on July 2 1962, the first Wal-Mart store opened its doors
in Rogers, Arkansas. Sam Walton was 44 years of age.
Sam Walton and Wal-Mart were and are the leaders in many business practices: discount retailing, competitive intelligence, profit sharing
with employees. Sam Walton was maybe one of the first corporate CEO's to recognize the potential of computers. He got the top candidate of
an IBM class to come and work for him to set up and control sales and merchandising.
In 1992 Sam Walton passed away at age 74 as the second richest person in the world after Bill Gates.
There are two things I find amazing about his legacy. Firstly, Wal-Mart is the biggest private employer in the US with more than
1.5 million employees. And secondly, five Waltons reside in the top 10 of Fortune's list of richest people in the world. Sam Walton,
though, will mostly be remembered as the man that forced retailing prices down for small-town America.
You can get the
Sam Walton biography, or rather autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America from Amazon.
Sam Walton biography links
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