Wal Mart

10 Pages 2514 Words

Revolution took place in the United States, factories were now able to out produce consumer demand. For the first time, these new goods needed new ways to be sold, new ways to get to the public. “In New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, the first department stores opened their doors. Railroads and telegraph wires snaked across the country, giving storekeepers a new way to order goods and get them on the shelves faster than ever before. A whole new industry sprang up to persuade people through advertisements with enticing pictures and clever slogans, to buy things they’d never known they needed, to turn America, in the phrase department store pioneer John Wanamaker, into the Land of Desire.”



At the same time, large corporations became another “dominant form of business”, such as with U.S. Steel, Swift, R.J. Reynolds, and Procter & Gamble. Department stores such as Woolworth, Penney, Sears, A&P, and Kroger became known in the retail environment.



Early Discount Approach:
“The first small discount stores” started in the 1930s, developed in the years after WWII and really began to take off in the 1960s as “giant discount chains”. This is where Sam Walton’s first ideas of Wal-Mart evolve. Most large discount chains were within the average city limits. Walton decided to take a different approach and develop stores “in towns everybody else ignored as too small”. He had spent considerable time in rural Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri; he knew “that small-town folks craved all the wonderful goods promised by the consumer culture just as much” as the other consumers. He also knew that there was more business than most people expected with less competition in these small towns.



As with most discount retailers, Walton would “take name-brand health and beauty aids (toothpaste, soap, shampoo, etc.) stack them high, and sell them at cost. Give them away for whatever you paid. Such barga...