Walmart

With annual revenues exceeding US$400 billion, Walmart is a retail colossus and at present the world's largest corporation. Walmart is a budget retailer that sells an unusually wide range of consumer goods in its enormous big-box stores, which first appeared in the U.S. South and Midwest in the mid-1960s. Since then, they spread rapidly across North America and, in various guises, Walmart now operates throughout Europe, Asia, and in certain parts of Africa. This rapid ascent has attracted a considerable level of attention from both critics and admirers. Whether the object of praise or blame, Walmart has attained an iconic status. Alongside the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, Wall Street, Google, Nike, and Facebook, Walmart features prominently in contemporary discussions about the organization, culture, and ethics of the global economy.

Walmart was founded in 1962 by Sam Walton in Rogers, Arkansas. Walton pursued a budget retail strategy from the outset, sourcing from only the cheapest suppliers and locating Walmart stores outside regional centers. Walmart's organizational culture bore the mark of its founder and its rural origins. Walmart praised small-town and (to some degree) Christian values, including loyalty, hard work, conformity, and patriotism, and it maintained a gendered division of labor such that most service-oriented employees were women while most managers and executives were men. Although it has changed significantly since its establishment, Walmart continues to reflect important features of its early beginnings.

Over the past fifty years, Walmart has grown rapidly such that it now employs upward of 2 million people across the world in 8,692 stores. Were it a national economy, Walmart would be roughly the size of Sweden (though growing at a faster rate), and it would be one of China's leading trade partners. While discussion about Walmart's growth continues, business analysts generally suggest three factors as crucial to its success, namely, Walmart's early adoption of advanced information and logistics technology, its capacity to restrain labor costs, and its skill in micromanaging suppliers.

In contrast to its unqualified success in North America, Walmart's international performance has been mixed. Although Walmart has been highly profitable in the United Kingdom (where it owns Associated Dairies [ASDA]), Walmart entered and then abandoned the German and South Korean markets, and its performance in Japan, Hong Kong, and Indonesia has not met expectations. This uneven record has caused analysts to question whether Walmart's business model can adapt to different kinds of markets, particularly those characterized by unique consumer cultures or regulated by higher labor [Page 1518]standards than those typical in North America. This question is likely to be answered in the near future since Walmart has recently made significant inroads into India and South Africa.

There is reason to question whether Walmart deserves the degree of attention it has attracted. In relative terms, Walmart is not the largest corporation in U.S. history. As a proportion of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), Walmart is smaller than General Motors was at its height during the mid-1950s. Further, Walmart may have perfected, but it did not invent, budget retailing. Many of the principles of budget retail were formulated by Walmart's competitors in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the largest stores of that era dwarf Walmart's much maligned supercenters. However, Walmart is noteworthy for the dominance it has achieved within the retail sector; Walmart's current revenues are greater than those of all its major competitors combined. This achievement has been enormously consequential for North America, specifically its labor standards and the manufacturing sector in general.

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