Sam Walton: Made In America

Sam Walton: Made In America shines a light on the man behind the biggest fortune ever amassed in business and explains how he built Walmart into a billion-dollar empire with hard work, incessant learning and an unrivaled resolve to make every single customer as happy as can be.

Sam was never reluctant to copy a great business strategy. The truth is he was always experimenting, sometimes with his own ideas, sometimes with practices he saw his competitors use successfully.

In fact, he was so obsessed with observing the competition that he once ended up in jail! On a trip to Brazil his hosts suddenly got a call from the police that they’d locked him up. When they got to the station the policemen informed them that they’d found this “old man” crawling around the floors of a retail store with a tape measure.

Sam had been measuring the width of the aisles to determine whether Brazilian retailers knew something he didn’t. That’s how dedicated he was to learning from the competition.

He often took competitor’s strategies and improved them, for example displaying items on wooden shelves was a new practice in many stores. To save money, Sam bought metal ones instead, thus saving enough to reduce prices even further.

The Walmart cheer, two cashiers at the front of the store and the fact that Walmart employees are to this day called “associates” are all strategies Sam learned from his competitors, so take a look around what your competitors are doing!

Sam really had only one goal for all of his stores: to make each and every single customer as happy as possibly can be. Whether that meant buying an $1,800 ice cream machine, lowering prices, keeping the store open longer, or driving 50 miles just to buy women’s stockings on sale and broaden the selection of his stores, so people would have to stop by less shops on their Saturday afternoon shopping trip. Sam’s had to take his fair share of criticism over the years, being accused of driving local stores out of business hundreds of times. But Sam thought that that’s just the nature of the business. After all, the market decides what’s good, and if people shopped rather at Walmart than at 5 different local stores, then that probably meant Walmart served them better. This competitive attitude didn’t mean he was desperate to serve everyone though. A paint shop owner once came into Walmart and thanked the store manager, because all employees had recommended his store to anyone who didn’t find what they needed at Walmart. As James Altucher would say: “Be like Google. Be the source.” Google just recommends things. Even their own competitors, if that’s what…