Levi Strauss was born Löb Strauß on February 26, 1829, in Buttenheim, a small village in the Kingdom of Bavaria, the son of a Jewish dry-goods peddler named Hirsch Strauss. His father died of tuberculosis around 1846, and in 1847 the eighteen-year-old Löb sailed with his mother and two sisters to the United States to join his older brothers Jonas and Louis, who ran a wholesale dry-goods business in New York called J. Strauss Brother & Co. He anglicized his name to Levi and learned the trade from the inside.
In early 1853 Strauss became a U.S. citizen, and the following year — drawn by the California Gold Rush — he reached San Francisco to open a West Coast branch of the family business. He did not come to dig but to sell, importing clothing, fabric, thread, and household goods and supplying the dry-goods stores of the booming mining country. Over two decades he built a prosperous, respectable wholesaling house, Levi Strauss & Co., long before the product that would carry his name into history existed.
In 1872 a Reno, Nevada tailor and customer named Jacob W. Davis wrote to Strauss describing a method he had devised for reinforcing the stress points of men’s work pants with copper rivets. Davis lacked the money to file a patent and proposed that Strauss, his fabric supplier, become his partner. Strauss agreed and financed the application; on May 20, 1873, U.S. Patent No. 139,121 for “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings” was granted to Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss & Co., with half assigned to the firm. The riveted “waist overall” — the garment we now call blue jeans — was born.
Strauss never married and had no children, and he ran his firm until his death on September 26, 1902. Estimates of his estate vary, from a frequently cited figure of roughly $6 million to as much as $30 million, divided among his nephews and a long list of charities. He did not, strictly speaking, invent the blue jean alone — Jacob Davis did the inventing, and Strauss supplied the denim, the capital, the patent, and the company that turned a workman’s trouser into one of the most successful and imitated garments in the history of clothing.
Samuel Moore Walton was born on March 29, 1918, in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and grew up during the Great Depression in a family that scraped by as his father worked in farm-loan and mortgage finance, work that sometimes meant repossessing farms from families who could not pay. From boyhood Sam contributed to the household, milking the family cow and bottling the surplus to sell, delivering newspapers on multiple routes, and selling magazine subscriptions — habits of thrift and hustle that never left him. He worked his way through the University of Missouri and, after graduating with an economics degree in 1940, took a job as a management trainee with the retailer J.C. Penney at $75 a month, where he first absorbed the discipline of running a store.
After Army service during World War II, Walton borrowed money — including a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law — and in 1945 bought a single Ben Franklin variety-store franchise in Newport, Arkansas. He turned it into the top-performing store in its region by relentlessly cutting prices, buying cleverly, and obsessing over what made customers come back. When his landlord refused to renew the lease and effectively forced him out, Walton started over in 1950 in the small town of Bentonville, Arkansas, opening Walton’s 5&10 and building a chain of variety stores across the rural mid-South.
Walton’s real insight was that big discount stores could thrive in the small towns that established retailers ignored. On July 2, 1962, at age 44, he opened the first Walmart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas. The formula — everyday low prices, high volume, thin margins, and ruthless control of costs and distribution — spread store by store across the region and then the country. Wal-Mart Stores was incorporated in 1969 and went public in 1970, and the proceeds and rising stock funded explosive expansion.
By the 1980s Walmart was one of the fastest-growing companies in America, and from 1982 to 1988 Forbes named Sam Walton the richest person in the country. He kept living relatively plainly — driving an old pickup, working the stores, leading employee cheers — until he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in March 1992 and died of cancer weeks later, on April 5, 1992. Through the company stock he had carefully kept in family hands, his heirs became the richest family in America; but Sam’s own story is the one that began with a Depression childhood and a single franchised five-and-dime.
James Cash Penney was born on September 16, 1875, on a farm near Hamilton, Missouri, the seventh of twelve children of a Primitive Baptist farmer who preached without pay. The family was poor and strict; from the age of eight James had to buy his own clothes, and after high school he went to work as a store clerk for a wage often recalled as $2.27 a month. He had no capital and no inheritance — only a reputation for honesty, a ferocious work ethic, and the ‘Golden Rule’ his father had drilled into him.
Ill health sent him west to the dry climate of Colorado, where he clerked for two merchants, Guy Johnson and Thomas Callahan, who ran cash-only ‘Golden Rule’ stores. They liked him enough to offer him a one-third partnership in a new store, and on April 14, 1902, twenty-six-year-old Penney opened a Golden Rule store in the tiny coal-mining town of Kemmerer, Wyoming, with about $2,000, most of it borrowed. It was a one-room dry-goods store selling for cash at fixed, fair prices — no credit, no haggling — and in its first year it cleared roughly $8,000 on sales of more than $28,000.
From that single store Penney built one of the great American retail chains. His decisive innovation was a partnership model: a proven store manager could take a one-third interest in a new store and, in turn, train and stake the next manager, so that growth funded itself and the best people became owners. He called his employees ‘associates’ and the company ‘the man with a thousand partners.’ Reincorporated as the J. C. Penney Company in 1913, the chain grew from 120 stores in 1920 to roughly 1,400 by 1929.
Then the Crash nearly destroyed him. Penney had borrowed heavily against his own company stock, partly to fund philanthropy, and had backed Florida ventures; when the market collapsed in 1929 and the Depression deepened, he lost an estimated $40 million as banks foreclosed on his pledged stock, and his health broke. He recovered through what he described as a religious reawakening, rebuilt his finances, and devoted his later decades to philanthropy and to mentoring younger businessmen, dying in 1971 at ninety-five with an estate of about $35 million and his name on more than 1,600 stores.