Sam Walton — the Five-and-Dime Operator Who Built Walmart

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.