Sam Walton's Argumentative Essay

Although there are many masterminds behind the large corporate companies in America, Sam Walton’s Walmart has had a quite large impact on the U.S economy. Walmart began with a man that had a dream in Rogers, Arkansas. Walmart has continued to grow since it was first created, and will keep growing with the future generations of economists. Little did Walton know when he opened that small store in 1962, that is would be such a success in today’s world. Samuel Moore Walton was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma on March 29, 1918. He graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in economics. Fresh out of college, Walton began working at a J.C. Penney, which was still a small retailer. In World War II, Walton served as Army captain.

By the year 1975, Walton had sales at 340.3 million dollars, and owned over one hundred twenty-five stores. Sam Walton had low prices and a good quality of products, but he mostly relied on his sales associates to give his customers a good shopping experience that would keep them coming back. If he did not like the numbers that were coming back to him, Walton would change around staff to optimize the shopping experience for the customer. In 1991, the country was in an economic downturn; however, Walmart’s sales increased forty percent. By 1995, Sam Walton had expanded his stores to all fifty states. Walton had one thousand nine hundred ninety-five Walmart stores, two hundred thirty-nine Supercenter, four hundred thirty-three Sam’s Clubs, and had two hundred seventy-six international stores. Sales from these stores topped 93.6

Since Walmart kept expanding, Walton was employing 1.1 million associates in three thousand nine hundred eighty-nine stores worldwide. For the very first time since 1962, Walmart was in the Fortune 500 ranking. The victims of Hurricane Katrina and Rita received two thousand four hundred fifty truckloads and eighteen million dollars worth of supplies from Walmart. In Walton’s dying years, he stayed to his humble image until his death. Walton suffered from two types of cancers in the last years of his life. He suffered from hairy-cell leukemia and bone marrow cancer. He resided in the same house in Bentonville, Arkansas, that he had lived in since 1959. He was named the wealthiest man in the United States in the 1985 Forbes magazine. Sam’s view on the matter was, “All that hullabaloo about somebody’s net worth is just stupid, and it’s made my life a lot more complex and difficult.” Unfortunately on April 5, 1992, Sam Walton lost his fight to cancer at the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences Hospital in Little Rock,