Samuel Moore Walton was an American businessman and entrepreneur best known for founding the retailers Walmart and Sam’s Club. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. grew to be the world’s largest corporation by revenue as well as the biggest private employer in the world. For a period of time, Walton was the richest man in America
Walmart Today
For the fiscal year ending in Janaury 2020, Walmart’s total revenue was $524 billion. The company employs 2.2 million people around the world in 11,766 store locations. Once a haven for rural shoppers, the company expects to clear $38 billion in online revenue in 2020.
Walton graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in economics (1940) and entered a J.C. Penney Company management training program in Des Moines, Iowa. He opened his own Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas, in 1945. By the early 1960s he and his brother, operated a regional chain of Ben Franklin stores. He opened the first Walmart store, Wal-Mart Discount City, in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, offering a wide variety of merchandise at discount prices in a no-frills setting.

Large American discount store chains typically situated their stores in or near large cities, but Walton succeeded in small towns to make them profitable. Volume buying and a low-cost delivery system enabled Wal-Mart Stores to offer name-brand goods at discount prices in locations where there was little competition from other retail chains. As a result, the Wal-Mart chain experienced tremendous and sustained growth, with 190 stores by 1977 and 800 stores by 1985.

In 1983 Walton founded Sam’s Wholesale Club, a chain of deep-discount wholesale warehouse outlets, and in 1988 he began opening Supercenters, which added full grocery fare to the regular merchandise offerings. By 1990 Wal-Mart Stores had passed Sears, Roebuck and Company to become the largest retailer in the United States. The next year the company began its international expansion with the opening of a store in Mexico. Growth continued, either through new stores or by the acquisition of established retailers, in countries such as Canada, China, Germany, and the United Kingdom.