Posts tagged Walmart
50 Years of Walmart (Good and Bad): Ten Ways Walmart Changed the World
On July 2, 1962 — 50 years ago today — Sam Walton opened the very first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas. Little did he know at the time that he was laying the foundation for an American institution that would reshape not just the retail industry, but America itself. 4,400 stores later, Walmart’s size and reach truly boggle the mind.
Walmart is the world largest private employer — only the U.S. Department of Defense and China’s People’s Liberation Army employ more people. Its more-than-2.1 million workers exceed the population of 15 states and the District of Columbia. Each week more than 140 million Americans shop at a Walmart, a figure that far surpasses the audience of the 2012 Super Bowl or the voter turnout of the 2008 presidential election. And though Walmart’s revenues — $443 billion for the latest fiscal year — are comparable to some of the world’s largest oil companies, they absolutely blow away its nearest retail competitors. Target’s latest fiscal year revenues were just shy of $70 billion. As Charles Fishman wrote in his book The Wall-Mart Effect,
“Walmart does more business by March 3 than Target does all year. Target doesn’t have a single store outside the United States; Walmart’s international stores alone generate almost twice Target’s total revenue.”
Not bad for an outfit that was no more than a lone outpost in small town Arkansas just 50 years ago.
(MORE: The Unexpected Effects of Walmart Coming to Town)
Of course, you don’t become one of the most powerful private organizations in the history of human civilization without turning over a few apple carts. Walmart’s relentless drive for efficiency has bankrupted companies, put downward pressure on wages, and upset a retail culture that some believe was less efficient but more personal and aesthetically pleasing. In this sense, Walmart’s story is the story of American capitalism. It is the story of an unwavering pursuit of innovation and efficiency and the casualties of that pursuit.
There have been winners and losers in Walmart’s headlong march to the top, and along the way the firm has transmuted the global economy and America itself. Here are 10 ways that Walmart has changed the world.
Read more from Time Magazine HERE
Is Walmart A Magnet For American Mayhem? : Linton Weeks
npr:
One customer was nabbed by police for sampling raw meat in a Pennsylvania store. A family of five was living in a car at a Walmart in Florida and, at a store in Missouri, a girl had a run-in with a monkey. At any given moment, there are 850,000 Americans inside a Walmart store. Something weird is bound to happen.
*Anybody else see this story title and think of the movie Where the Heart Is, where Natalie Portman plays a pregnant teenager who ends up living in a Walmart after her boyfriend abandons her there? — Tanya Ballard Brown
