I bought my first vinyl album from the Walmart in Ash Flat in 1976.
It was the “Eagles Greatest Hits (1971-1975),” the one with the painted eagle skull on the cover with the blue Mylar background. I played “Lyin’ Eyes,” “Take it Easy” and “Take it to the Limit” on a stereo my parents bought for me from Walmart.
Thirty-nine years after buying the Eagles’ album, while visiting Ash Flat, I bought my first flat-screen television set from the same Walmart. The store had moved about a mile down U.S. 412 toward Highland and became a Supercenter, but it was still in the tiny Sharp County town.
Walmart is part of my near-daily routine. When I met my wife-to-be in a northern suburb of Chicago in 2015, I knew she was the one after I experienced the domestic bliss of shopping with her in the store. Our first date was actually a trip to the Gurnee, Ill., Walmart Supercenter to buy toilet seats for the home she was putting up for sale.
Now, back home in Jonesboro, I go to the nearby Walmart Neighborhood Market with The List, the itinerary of things we need that my wife scrawls on the back of an envelope or notebook paper.
Walmart is a vital part of our culture whether we realize it or not.
The proliferation of Walmart has become so great that a study recently showed that 90 percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Supercenter or Neighborhood Market.
The first store opened in 1962 in Bentonville by a humble Sam Walton, who drove his old pickup truck around town and later, despite being a billionaire, stayed at budget motels or store managers’ homes when traveling.
Although he espoused that good ol’ boy charm and down-home goodness, Walton was a shrewd genius when it came to business. With his slogan, “Always the low price. Always,” Walton created the concept of one-stop shopping. Need groceries? Go to Walmart. Need toilet seats? Go to Walmart. Need vinyl Eagles albums or flat-screen televisions? Well, you know where to go.
Walton’s empire could have begun in Missouri rather than Northwest Arkansas. He had a chance to buy a Federated department store in St. Louis for $10,000. His wife, Helen, whom Sam married on Valentine’s Day in 1943, nixed that idea, saying a town of 10,000 was large enough for them. He bought a Ben Franklin store in Newport for $25,000 and took a two-week business course in Arkadelphia to learn the trade.
He decided to buy products directly from manufactures rather than through a company that increased his costs by 25 percent, Walton wrote in his 1992 book “Sam Walton: Made in America.”
He hitched a trailer to the back of his car, and after work he’d drive to Missouri and Tennessee to buy things.
“I’d bring them back, price them low and blow that stuff out of the store,” he wrote.
“Here’s the simple lesson we learned … which eventually changed the way the retailers sell and customers buy all across America,” Walton wrote of his early years in business. “I might only make half the profit per item, but because I was selling three times as many, the overall profit was much greater. In retailer language, you can lower your markup but earn more because of the increased volume.”
The idea worked. In his first year in Newport, his Ben Franklin store made $105,000, compared to $72,000 the year before. The next year, he earned $140,000 and then $175,000.
Walton’s landlord, who owned the Ben Franklin store building, didn’t renew Walton’s lease after five years, seeing the potential for profit for himself.
Walton considered opening a store in Siloam Springs, but opted instead for Bentonville where he bought the 4,000-square-foot Harrison’s Variety Store. He hauled lighting fixtures from the Newport store in his truck, taking a dirt road around a weigh station in Rogers because he knew he was overloaded and didn’t want to pay extra fees.
He opened his first Walmart in Bentonville on July 2, 1962. Within five years, he owned 24 stores and earned $12.7 million. In 1972, he made $78 million, and in 1980 saw sales top $1 billion in his 276 stores.
Walton’s empire was criticized by people who thought his stores were putting the mom-and-pop stores out of business.
“Of all the notions I’ve heard about Walmart, none has ever baffled me more than this idea that we are somehow the enemy of small town America,” he wrote in his biography. “Nothing could be further from the truth: Walmart has actually kept quite a number of small towns from becoming practically extinct by offering low prices and saving literally billions of dollars for the people who live there as well as creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in our stores.”
Walton died on April 5, 1992, but his business legacy lives on. Walmart now has over 11,000 stores worldwide with 2.2 million employees and $572.75 billion in sales last year. It far surpassed Exxon Mobil as the largest company by revenue.
When looking back on some of the more cultural and lifestyle changing events of the past century, Sam Walton’s business idea for one-stop shopping has to be considered one of the most impactful. Whether you want food, clothing, household appliances, hardware, sporting goods or even Eagles albums, it’s all there under one roof.
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