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Sunday, April 24, 2011

History of Walmart

This post covers the history of Walmart, the large international discount retail chain.

The history of Walmart can be traced back to the 1940s when Sam Walton began his career in retailing at J.C. Penny. In 1943 Walton met the Butler Brothers who owned the retail chain Ben Franklin Stores. On May 9, 1950, Walton purchased a store from Luther E. Harrison in Bentonville, Arkansas, and opened Walton's 5 & 10. Thus, the Ozark Mountain town of 2,900 residents would become the headquarters for the world's largest retailer.

At some point Sam Walton made the decision to achieve higher sales volumes by keeping sales prices lower than his competitors by reducing his profit margin. By 1960, he had eleven Walton's stores. Inspired by the successes of other discount department store chains, Walton opened the first store in his own discount chain in Rogers, Arkansas that year. Responsible for the purchase and maintenance of signage, Walton's assistant, Bob Bogle, came up with the name "Wal-Mart" for the new chain. By 1967, the company grew to 24 stores across the state of Arkansas, and had reached $12.6 million in sales, and by 1968, the company opened its first stores outside of Arkansas in Sikeston, Missouri and Claremore, Oklahoma.

In 1981, Wal-Mart moved into the southeastern U.S. market, opening stores in Georgia and South Carolina, and acquiring 92 Kuhn's Big K stores. They moved into Florida and Nebraska in 1982.
In April 1983, the company opened its first Sam's Club store, a membership-based discount warehouse club, in Midwest City, Oklahoma. They also opened new Wal-Mart stores in Indiana, Iowa, New Mexico and North Carolina, and implemented "people greeters" in all of their stores. In 1984, they entered the Virginia market.
In 1985, with 882 stores with sales of $8.4 billion and 104,000 associates, the company entered Wisconsin and Colorado, and the first stores in Minnesota opened the following year, in 1986.

In 2000, H. Lee Scott was named president and CEO and US sales had doubled to $156 billion since 1995.
Also in 2000, Walmart was ranked fifth by Fortune magazine on its Global Most Admired All-Stars list, and in 2003 and 2004, as the most admired company in America.
In 2005, Walmart had $312.4 billion in sales, more than 6,200 facilities around the world, including 3,800 stores in the United States and 3,800 international units, and employing more than 1.6 million associates worldwide. In fact, their U.S. presence had grown so rapidly that there were only small pockets of the country that remained further than 60 miles away from the nearest Walmart. Approximately 138 million customers visited Walmart stores each week all over the world. Their corporate philanthropy efforts also assisted the U.S. hurricane relief efforts with $18 million in cash donations.

In late 2005, Walmart designed two experimental stores, one in McKinney, Texas and the other in Aurora, Colorado, which featured wind turbines, photovoltaic solar panels, biofuel-capable boilers, water-cooled refrigerators, and xeriscape gardens. The buildings also included many other energy and cost saving technologies.
In March 2006, Walmart sought to appeal to a more affluent demographic, with the opening of a new supercenter in Plano, Texas which was intended to compete against stores that some viewed as more upscale and appealing. The new store features wooden floors, wider aisles, a sushi bar, a coffee/sandwich shop (with free Wi-Fi Internet access), a Subway, and higher-end items such as microbrew beer, expensive wines, and high-end electronics. The exterior sports the less-common hunter green background behind the Walmart letters instead of the trademark blue.

Over the last decade or so Walmart has become involved in thousands of lawsuits for a variety of reasons. The majority of the suits are class action lawsuits in which employees are suing for unpaid wages. They have also run into many discrimination cases in which employees are suing for being profiled out of money or out of jobs. For instance, there were two separate cases, one in 2004 and one in 2005 in which African Americans were suing two different Walmarts for denying them jobs based on race. These became so popular that the reverend Jesse Jackson spoke during both of the proceedings. There are also many lawsuits in which women are suing Wal-Mart for discriminating against them. In one article written in 2004 USA today mentioned 32 different lawsuits that involved women suing Walmart. All of this has not affected Walmart financially however, according to Fortune 500, Walmart still had $351 billion in revenue ($11 billion in profit) in 2007, a new high for the corporation.

As of October 2009, Walmart stores operate in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, Pakistan,and the United States.

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