With Wal-Mart Stores Inc. back atop the Fortune 500 list of biggest U.S. companies, about 14,000 shareholders from around the world will stream into Northwest Arkansas this week for the company’s annual meeting and pep rally.
The Bentonville-born discounter recorded $466 billion in revenues (Fortune reported the total at $469 billion) last year, nosing out Exxon Mobil Corp. With 2.2 million workers, Wal-Mart is also one of the world’s biggest employers. And yet, experts say, balance sheet and payroll only begin to convey the company’s size and reach.
“The scale of Wal-Mart is so big that every decision has wide-ranging impacts,” said Kathy Deck, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville Sam M. Walton College of Business, named for the Wal-Mart founder.
When the world’s largest retailer removes cardboard packaging from deodorant, Deck said, that affects landfills around the world. When Wal-Mart offers $4 prescription medicines, other companies across the nation are forced to do the same, and $4 prescriptions become the new norm.
From customer visits to crayon sales, here’s a look by the numbers at the corporate giant:DID YOU KNOW WAL-MART
Typically hires about 500,000 people worldwide per year. That number of new employees alone almost equals the total workforces of General Motors (213,000), Boeing (174,400), Apple (76,100) and U.S. Steel (39,000) combined.
Tallies 6.6 billion customer visits to its stores worldwide each year. With the estimated world population at about 7 billion, that’s not far from one visit from every person.
Would rank, if it were a country with $466 billion in revenues, as the world’s 25th largest economy. Wal-Mart revenues beat the gross national product of Argentina ($446 billion). And it falls just behind Norway ($486 billion).
Ranks as the world’s third-largest employer, behind the U.S. Department of Defense, with 3.2 million soldiers and other workers, and the People’s Liberation Army of China, 2.3 million. Fourth place? It’s a tie between McDonald’s (including its franchises) and China National Petroleum Corp., at 1.7 million workers each.
Claims a combined area under roof of 573 million square feet in its 3,182 U.S. Supercenters, which average about 180,000 square feet each. That space would fill the nation’s tallest highrise, the new One World Trade Center with 2.6 million square feet, about 220 times.
Makes most Fortune 500 companies look small by comparison. Wal-Mart has swapped the two top spots on the prestigious list in recent years with Exxon Mobil. But the other 498 U.S companies don’t come close in sales revenues, the key measure used by the list’s author, Fortune magazine.
Wal-Mart’s revenues are almost twice as high as No. 3 Chevron, at $233.9 billion. They’re more than 15 times larger than No. 100 Nationwide Insurance, with $30.4 billion.
Employs about 48,000 people in Arkansas alone. That roughly equals the combined enrollments of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville (24,500), Arkansas State University (14,000), and the University of Central Arkansas (11,100).
Sells 24.5 million Crayola crayon boxes during a single back-to-school season. That translates into a crayon set in every household in Arkansas (1.3 million), Missouri (2.7 million), Oklahoma (1.7 million), Louisiana (2 million) and Tennessee (2.8 million) - plus Texas (10 million)and New Jersey (3.6 million).
Sells a tube of Maybelline Great Lash Mascara, the chain’s most popular brand, every four seconds. That’s two tubes per year for every resident of the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles.
Sold 1.3 million televisions on Black Friday last year, equivalent to one for every Arkansas household. Also sold that day 1.8 million towels, 1.3 million dolls and 250,000 bicycles.
Will sell, on average, 22,000 sets of shorts and swimwear this summer at each Wal-Mart store. That means a single store could supply shorts, trunks and bathing suits for everyone in Arkansas’ oil capital, El Dorado. And still have enough left over for everybody in the state’s pickle capital of Atkins.
Sold 426 million gallons of gasoline as part of a discount program between Aug. 31 and Dec. 24, 2012, enough to fill one of the world’s best-selling cars, the 12.6-gallon Ford Focus - 34.4 million times.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Fortune magazine, The Economist, The World Bank, World Population Review, The Associated Press
Business, Pages 63 on 06/02/2013