Sam Walton on Wal-Mart’s early days

“I guess everybody who knew I was going ahead with the discounting idea on my own really did think I’d completely lost my mind. I laugh now when I look back on Wal-Mart’s beginning. In 1962, the discount industry was fairly young and full of high-living, big-spending promoters driving around in Cadillacs—guys like Herb Gibson—who had the world by the tail. But it had very few of what you’d call good operators—until 1962, the year which turned out to be the big one for discounting. In that year, four companies that I know of started discount chains. S. S. Kresge, a big, 800-store variety chain, opened a discount store in Garden City, Michigan, and called it Kmart. F. W. Woolworth, the granddaddy of them all, started its Woolco chain. Dayton-Hudson out of Minneapolis opened its first Target store. And some independent down in Rogers, Arkansas, opened something called a Wal-Mart. At the time, and for quite a while after that, I can guarantee you that hardly anybody noticed that last guy. Heck, within five years, Kmart had 250 stores to our 19, and sales of more than $800 million to our $9 million. Here’s what makes me laugh today: it would have been absolutely impossible to convince anybody back then that in thirty years most all of the early discounters would be gone, that three of these four new chains would be the biggest, best-run operators in the business, that the one to fold up would be Woolco, and that the biggest, most profitable one would be the one down in Arkansas. Sometimes even I have trouble believing it. 

I can tell you this, though: after a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-Mart’s phenomenal success has been that very tendency. Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity. The things that we were forced to learn and do, because we started out underfinanced and undercapitalized in these remote, small communities, contributed mightily to the way we’ve grown as a company. Had we been capitalized, or had we been the offshoot of a large corporation the way I wanted to be, we might not ever have tried the Harrisons or the Rogers or the Springdales and all those other little towns we went into in the early days. It turned out that the first big lesson we learned was that there was much, much more business out there in small-town America than anybody, including me, had ever dreamed of.”