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History of walmart case study
Introduction of Walmart
Essay on walmart history
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Sam Walton:
Entrepreneurial Genius and Creator of Wal-Mart
Dedication, risk-taking, empire-building, and world shaking; words that describe a man that changed this world. This man is not any ordinary man, but a man of vision and hope; a man that started from nothing, and if alive today would be worth more then Bill Gates. Sam Walton, creator and founder of Wal-Mart Incorporations, shaped this world. From his birth on March 29, 1918 in Kingfisher, Oklahoma to his death in April 6, 1992 at Little Rock, Arizona (Sam Walton NNDB), Sam Walton changed this world both for the better and the worse by providing such cheep goods to people around the world.
Born into a family that was no well off, Sam quickly learned as a kid the value of a dollar. "During high school Walton was very athletic playing basketball and football as starting quarterback for Columbia’s Hickman High School. He became the vice president of the student body during his junior year and moved up to president during his senior year, and he also excelled academically becoming an honors student.(Sam Walton InvestingValue) "In 1940 he graduated from the University of Missouri with a business degree, and while all throughout high school and college he had a paper rout and was making about 4 to $5,000 a year, which at that time wasn’t bad because they were going threw the great depression" (Walton and Huey p. 20).
After college Sam went on to “do a management position at J.C. Penny’s and remained there until 1962. Late in 1962 Sam Walton changed this world, and he opened the first Wal-Mart”( “Sam Walton“ InvestingValue)(see “First Wal-Mart Store“). “We opened our first Wal-Mart here in Northwest Arkansas” (Walton and Huey XI). With his first Wal-Mart open he didn’t...
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... Nov 2004. 8. eLibrary. Proquest CSA. Hermon High School. 13 May 2008. .
“Sam Walton’s Wife.” Photo. Money.cnn.com. 2008. 3 May 2008
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“First Wal-Mart Store.” Photo. HRH Media.com. 2008. 7 May 2008 download.html>. “Wal-Mart Smiley Face.” Photo. adweek.blogs.com. 2004. 4 May 2008 .
“Wal-Mart Founder and Billionaire.” Fresh Thinking Business. 2008. Fresh Business Thinking. 7 May 2008 .
“Sam Walton (aka Samuel Moore Waltonn).” About.com. 2008. The New York Times Company . 9 May 2008
p/aasamwalton.htm>.
Brookshire Grocery Company, known for its commitment to excellent customer service, was established in 1938. The company began with one store in downtown Tyler, Texas under the name Brookshire Brothers. Soon after, the company changed its name to Brookshire Grocery Company and expanded to four stores in Tyler and Longview, Texas, which included the first air-conditioned store in East Texas (brookshires.com). Over the years, the Brookshire Grocery Company chain has grown to more than 150 stores throughout Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and, most recently, Mississippi.
Wal-Mart was conceived and founded by Sam Walton in 1962, at Rogers, Arkansas. Sam Walton started with just a few small variety stores, funded with borrowed money. His goal was to provide affordable products to the public to make life easier. After his success with the first few stores, Sam Walton borrowed more money to build more stores, creating the Wal-Mart empire as we see it today. The retail giant proves its stoic presence in our lives with its $401 billion sales for fiscal year 2009.
Sam Walton was born on March 29, 1918 to Thomas Gibson and Nancy Lee Walton near Kingfisher, Oklahoma. They lived on a small farm but when that was proven non-profitable they moved out of Oklahoma to many towns across Missouri. Sam Walton was the starting quarterback for his football team and was an honors student. He attended the University of Missouri, where he majored in Economics. After a few setbacks Sam decided he wanted to own his own department store. His dream came a reality in the fall of 1945 when he purchased a store in Newport, Missouri with the help of his father-in-law.
He was also considered charismatic. He communicated directly with his employees (associates) and he expected customers to be treated as guests when they entered his store. “Mr. Walton always worked hard at shaping his work force, using cheers, rap songs and payment policies to urge employees to be frugal in their jobs and friendly toward customers. Bonuses were paid to all employees in stores where stealing and other inventory losses were kept below 2 percent of sales. Scholarships were established at colleges in names of employees who crafted better ways to handle merchandise.” (nytimes.com, 1992). Today this is not the case. Since the death of Sam Walton in 1992, the company’s reputation has been on a continual downslide. Wal-mart is no longer an ethical company; it has negatively impacted the communities in which it exists. It mistreats its employees and is negatively impacting the nation’s over-all economy. Ethical business practices are not the way of life for today’s Wal-mart.
Wal-Mart as we know it today evolved from Sam Walton’s goals for great value and great customer service. Mr. Walton’s competitors thought his idea that a successful business could be built around offering lower prices and great service would never work. Mr. Walton also credited the rapid growth of Wal-Mart not just to the low costs that attracted his customers, but also to his associates. He relied on them to give customers the great shopping experience that would keep them coming back. Sam shared his vision for the company with associates in a way that was nearly unheard of in the industry. He made them partners in the success of the company, and firmly believed that this partnership was what made Walmart great.
Wal-Mart has been a staple of America since July 2, 1962, when Sam Walton opened the first Wal-Mart Discount City store. Within a few years, Wal-Mart Discount City stores began to spread across the country. In 1968, it opened its first stores outside Arkansas, in Sikeston, Missouri and Claremore, Oklahoma. Sam Walton found success in offering consumers options and variety. Since that first store opened, Wal-Mart has now entered the grocery business and now the company controls about 20% of the retail grocery and consumables business. This says a lot about a man who began his retail career after working just 18 months at J.C Penny. Sam Walton found success early on with offering variety, and options when no one else was.
This is a good question. Walmart started as a small five and dime in the city of Bentonville, Arkansas by a man named Sam Walton. After a great success Sam and his wife Helen moved to Rogers, Arkansas where he opened his very first Walmart. He had some retailing experience after his time in the war and he chose Bentonville for the hunting season and because his wife wanted to live in a small town. His ideas of not pocketing extra cash from manufacturers, but rather giving deals to customers and trying to make profit off of how much he sold, changed the way retailers make money in America. Sam had a cheap mindset, not only for his customers, but for himself. Even when he became the richest man in America he continued to get his hair done for
Wal-Mart initially began its operations in 1945, when Sam Walton leased a ‘Ben Franklin’ franchise variety store in Newport, Arkansas. After relocating to Rogers, Arkansas in the early 1950s, Sam Walton’s ‘Ben Franklin’ became ‘Walton’s 5 & 10’. By 1962, Walton found himself the chain owner of 11 different Walton’s stores across Arkansas. He then decided to rename the chain ‘Wal-Mart’, after himself. On October 31, 1969, after further expansion across the state, the chain was incorporated as Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Three years later, Wal-Mart was approved and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
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.).
Wal-Mart was established in 1962 by Sam Walton. The first Wal-Mart store was built in Rogers, Arkansas. Wal-Mart's were gradually put up around the United States and then moving to other countries such as Japan.
The Wal-mart is the largest retail chain in United States and in the world. The wal-mart was founded in the year 1962 by Mr Sam Walton. It was originally named as Wal-Mart discount city in Rogers, Arkansas. At the time when the Wal-Mart stores started in the year 1962 it was focused only in small rural cites and town which had a population of 5000 to 25000. It was soon increased to 18 stores in 1969. In the next 30 years it had more than 4750 stores across 50 states in USA and 9 countries with $245 billion sales. It started its international operations in Mexico in the year 1991 and then it expanded it to different countries across Europe and Asia.
Bill Gates Through his intelligence and excellent business skills, Bill Gates was able to change the world. As a technological genius, he founded the world's largest software company. He has also been extremely generous, donating more than $30 billion as a philanthropist. He is, without a doubt, a catalyst for change, tirelessly working to make the world a better place.
The first Wal-Mart store opened in July of 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas by Sam Walton who believed that the future of retailing was in discounting and to avoid competing with established giants like Sears and Woolworth, Wal-Mart’s stated out of the large cities in the beginning and this strategy help avoid competition, while in rural areas Wal-Mart began growing their customer base by offering ways to save money and shorter travel distance, Sam Walton felt the best way to make customers happy was to provide the low prices every day (Farhoomand, 2006). The company needed to continually find ways to control the operating costs so the savings would then be passed on to Wal-Mart customers in the form of lower prices than the competitors. Walton was opposed to having any kind of employee unions for its company and saw them as a disruption and an inconvenience (Farhoomand, 2006). The continued search for lower prices made him aware of business related travel cost, Wal-Mart executives stayed in low cost hotels when they traveled and the cost related to the services provided by suppliers, Wal-Mart helped suppliers improve operations and efficiency to produce lower cost. Walton wanted the suppliers to correct any nonessential or insufficiencies existing in their business structures as a way of gaining lower prices and higher value products for its Wal-Mart stores. To further push savings Wal-Mart forced cost down by eliminating the middleman and buying directly from the manufacturers. This cost saving also applied to executive salaries Walton felt providing employees with stock options, training opportunities, and allow employees to grow and develop would be a better way to engage and involve them in his vision (Farhoomand, 2006).
In junior high and high school he became quite a young businessman. He was living in the Washington, D.C. area at the time, while his father served four terms as a congressman. At thirteen, he worked two newspaper routes, retrieved lost golf balls, and handicapped racehorses. He saved the money he earned and bought reconditioned pinball machine for $25 each and put them in the local barbershops where he was soon making about $50 dollars per week (Train). In high school, Buffett and a friend bought a 1934 Rolls Royce for $350 and rented it out for $35 per day. When he graduated high school at sixteen, Warren had already saved up over$6000 (which would worth $60,000, today), which helped to finance his college tuition.
Wal-mart has a reputation for caring for its customers, of course their employees, and for the prospective public. So Wal-Mart can be an industrial leader for the world of shoppers with an eye for lower affordable prices, company decision makers would continue it's systematic strategies that it's founder and president established years ago. Sam Walton believed in three guiding principles in his strategy planning they were to provide the customer with good value and service, to have a good relationship with its associates, and to be involved with the community.