Sam Walton

Sam Walton , the founder of Walmart 

Biography

Samuel Moore "Sam" Walton was born on March 29, 1918 and died in April 5, 1992. He was an American businessman and entrepreneur born in Kingfisher, Oklahombest known for founding the retailers Walmart and Sam's Club. Sam Walton was born to Thomas Gibson Walton and Nancy Lee in Kingfisher, Oklahoma. There, he lived with his parents on their farm until 1923. Sam's father decided farming did not generate enough income on which to raise a family, so he decided to go back to a previous profession of a mortgage man. He and his family moved from Oklahoma to Chesterfield, Missouri. There they moved from one small town to another for several years. Eventually the family landed in Columbia, Missouri. Growing up during the Great Depression, Walton had numerous chores to help make financial ends meet for his family as was common at the time. He milked the family cow, bottled the surplus, and drove it to customers. Afterwards, he would deliver Columbia Daily Tribune newspapers on a paper route. In addition, he also sold magazine subscriptions. Walton joined JC Penney as a management trainee in Des Moines, Iowa three days after graduating from college. This position paid him $75 a month. He resigned in 1942 in anticipation of being inducted into the military for service in World War II.

Career

After leaving the military in 1945, Walton took over management of his first variety store at the age of 26. With the help of a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law, plus $5,000 he had saved from his time in the Army, Walton purchased a Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas. With the sales volume growing from $80,000 to $225,000 in three years, Walton drew the attention of the landlord, P.K. Holmes, whose family had a history in retail.  Admiring Sam's great success, and desiring to reclaim the store or his son, he refused to renew the lease. The lack of a renewal option, together with the prohibitively high rent of 5% of sales, were early business lessons to Walton. Despite forcing Walton out, Holmes bought the store's inventory and fixtures for $50,000, which Walton called "a fair price". Before he bought the Bentonville store, it was doing $72,000 in sales. After the expansion, and 5 years under Walton, it was doing $250,000 in sales annually. On July 2, 1962, the first true Wal-Mart opened in Rogers, Arkansas. It was called the Wal-Mart Discount City store and located at 719 West Walnut Street. Soon after, the Walton brothers teamed up with the Stefan Dasbach, leading to the first of many stores to come. He launched a determined effort to market American-made products. Included in the effort was a willingness to find American manufacturers who could supply merchandise for the entire Wal-Mart chain at a price low enough to meet the foreign competition.  As another chain store, Meijer, grew it caught the attention of Walton. He acknowledges that his one-stop-shopping centre format was based on Meijer’s innovative concept. Contrary to the prevailing practice of American discount store chains, Walton located stores in smaller towns, not larger cities. To make his model work, he emphasized logistics, particularly locating stores within a day's drive proximity to Wal-Mart's regional warehouses, and distributed through its own trucking service.