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Sam Waltman, the future retail magnet, established the first Walmart store in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas.
Suburban America was booming, and he found the opportunity to ride that trend to riches.
Waltman expanded his chain of discount stores across Arkansas throughout the 60s.
He was a wizz in logistics and inventory management, and that chain grew exponentially.
By 1970 Walmart was generating over $31 million in annual revenues and began nipping on the heels of other major retail brands.
Waltman continued to drive Walmart’s national expansion throughout the 1980s and 1990s until it became the world’s largest retailer on the planet—he changed America’s retail landscape.
Waltman died in 1992 at age 74.
He’s remembered for his American entrepreneurial capitalism in action.
David Glass was the first CEO after Waltman’s death.
His reign was known for growth and innovation, which cemented Walmart’s dominance in American retail.
Glass was a supply chain management genius who pioneered the supercenter retail concept.
Critics blasted him for his cutthroat cost-cutting and focus on short-term profits, but as CEO, he oversaw Walmart’s annual revenues from $44 billion to over $165 billion!
H. Lee Scott led Walmart through a storm of increasing competition.
However, Scott made Walmar a global brand by expanding internationally and bringing Walmart online to compete with the likes of Amazon.
He’s been celebrated for Walmart’s environmentally and socially conscious policies—bringing together initiatives around sustainability, health care, and workplace equality—though some argued his efforts were just a ploy to remake Walmart’s image.
By the end of Scott’s nine-year tenure, he increased Walmart’s total sales to nearly $400 billion.
It looked as though Walmart was an unstoppable juggernaut.
CEO Mike Duke got the unlikely position of navigating Walmart through the Great Recession.
To get through the hard times he focussed on improving customer service and modernizing Walmart’s e-commerce operations—but some of his innovations failed to evolve with consumer habits of the new generation of shoppers.
Duke was also stuck with unionization efforts and bribery investigations across Walmart’s global operations.
However, he was able to restore stronger profit margins by the end of the recession.
By the end of his tenure, Walmart remained the world’s undisputed brick-and-mortar retail leader.
Inheriting the mantle in 2014, CEO Doug McMillon has attempted to refashion Walmart into a competent e-commerce platform by emphasizing digital integration across its global operations.
He’s also been focusing on automating warehouses to streamline online grocery delivery.
McMillon aims to retain dominance in physical shopping while future-proofing Walmart against e-commerce via strategic acquisitions, billion-dollar investments in technical infrastructure, and targeted cost-cutting.
The success of McMillon’s transformation agenda remains an unfinished story, but it will surely shape Walmart’s trajectory in this disruptive new era.
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