BENTONVILLE -- A surprising insight at the Walmart Museum is that it took Sam Walton quite a long time to build the world's largest retail enterprise. A quarter-century went by before his business really began taking off.
An illustrated timeline at the popular museum on Bentonville's downtown square records Walton's very gradual progress, beginning with the Ben Franklin outlet he took over in Newport in 1945 at age 27.
Five years later, he bought a Bentonville variety store at the site of today's museum and ran it under the name Walton's 5 & 10.
Another 12 years went by before the opening in Rogers of Wal-Mart Discount City, his first use of the name that is now a ubiquitous global brand.
Through the 1960s, growth was modest. At the end of that decade, Walton was still merely a regional player, operating 35 stores in four states with $30.8 million in annual revenue.
Only in the 1970s did Wal-Mart's growth really skyrocket. When that decade ended, 276 stores were producing $1.24 billion a year. By the end of the 1980s, 1,528 stores were taking in $26 billion annually. The current count is 11,453 stores, 6,290 of them international, with 2.2 million employees and projected 2015 sales of $486 billion.
Museum visitors can begin by watching a five-minute video. In it, Wal-Mart Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon extols Walton as an "unpretentious leader" who "believed in making heroes out of people" and was "an illustration of the American dream."
Those worshipful words set the tone for an attraction that has some trappings of a shrine. Among the relics on display are Walton's 1979 Ford half-ton truck and the Presidential Medal of Freedom he received from George H.W. Bush. Family artifacts include the cane of Walton's father, Tom, and the 1943 wedding dress of wife Helen.
The most elaborate memorial exhibit, behind ceiling-to-floor plate glass, is Walton's executive office. The room, preserved as it was before his death in 1992, was transported to the museum complete with paperwork still in place.
Visitors of a cynical bent might scoff at such reverence. They might also gripe about the absence of any details regarding the controversies surrounding Wal-Mart.
But Sam Walton's legacy and the sheer magnitude of Wal-Mart's growth speak volumes in the museum's detailed accounting. Their global scope is manifest in a brochure titled "Sam Walton's Rules for Building a Business."
The brochure unfolds to six pages, because it is printed not only in English, but also in French, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese.
Admission is free to the Walmart Museum, 105 N. Main St., Bentonville. Hours are 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 8 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday, noon-9 p.m. Sunday. The attached Spark Cafe is a 1950s-style soda fountain and coffee shop. Call (479) 273-1329 or visit walmartmuseum.com.
Weekend on 07/02/2015