He chose retail.
19 18, sam walton was born in a small town in Arkansas, USA. After that, his family moved to Marshall Town, Shelburne Town and Columbia Town, Missouri, where Walton spent his primary and secondary school days. 1936 entered the university of Missouri.
Because his family is not well off, Walton has been making money by delivering newspapers to maintain his expenses since high school. After entering the university, he opened several new newspaper delivery routes and hired several people to help him, earning 4,000 to 5,000 dollars a year. Walton gave full play to his personal charm and leadership in college, serving as monitor, president of student union and leader of various student groups and fraternity, which helped him to expand more newspaper subscribers among students. In addition to delivering newspapers, he also worked as a waiter in a restaurant in exchange for three meals a day for free. At the same time, he also worked as a lifeguard in the swimming pool to earn more living expenses. This hard and busy work-study life makes Walton, who will become a billionaire in the future, still cherish the value of every dollar.
Walton plans to go to Wharton Business School in Pennsylvania for further study after receiving his degree from the University of Missouri. But he knows that the money raised by his work-study program can't afford to go to Wharton College for further study. So he decided to work after graduating from college. He once wanted to be an insurance salesman because he thought he was an expert in sales promotion. He also contacted the retail industry. One of his neighbors owns 60 chain grocery stores, and he once talked with this neighbor about the management of retail industry. Near graduation, two companies that recruited employees from the University of Missouri were willing to offer positions to Walton, who chose the job of J.C. Penny, a company known as "street millionaire".
J.C. Penny has chain stores all over the world. 1On June 3rd, 940, just three days after graduating from Walton University, he reported to the branch in Des Moines, Iowa, and started to work as an intern in the management department, with a monthly salary of $75. This day is of great significance to Walton, because it is his first day in the retail industry, and he has worked in this industry for more than 50 years since then.
Walton has been working in J.C. Penny for 18 months, and the time has entered the beginning of 1942. At that time, World War II was still going on. As a college graduate of ROTC, Walton is ambitious to join the army. In order to wait for enlistment, he quit his job in J.C. Penny Company. Because he failed the medical examination, he was assigned to the troops carrying out logistics tasks. While waiting for the call-up, Walton went to the south, met his later wife Helen Robson near Tulsa, and fell in love soon. During his passionate love, Walton received a call-up notice from the military and served as a second lieutenant in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. Later, he was promoted to lieutenant and captain. A year after joining the army, he married Helen. 1945 when he left the army at the end of the war, he had decided to enter the retail industry and start his own business.
Join Ben Franklin's shop
Helen's father is an excellent lawyer, banker and rancher. He loves his daughter-in-law very much and hopes that they can move to Claremore to live with him. However, both Walton and Helen want to achieve their careers. Under the introduction of a classmate, Walton went to Butler Brothers, a regional retailer, to seek cooperation opportunities. The company's grocery chain is called "Ben Franklin Store", which mainly deals in cheap goods. Walton decided to join and buy a chain store.
The Ben Franklin store provided by Butler Brothers to Walton is located in Newport, Arkansas. Walton bought the shop for $25,000, of which $5,000 was his savings and $20,000 was borrowed from Helen's father. Walton set an ambitious goal to make this small store in Newport the best-run and most profitable grocery store in Arkansas within five years. However, after all the transactions were completed, the inexperienced Walton found that the store had lost money year after year. Not only is the rent extremely high, the business is light, but there is also a strong competitor Sterling Store across the street, and the operation difficulty can be imagined. Although the situation is grim, Walton is a newborn calf and is not afraid of tigers. On September 1945, his store officially opened.
The Butler brothers asked their chain stores to buy the goods uniformly distributed by the company and set the sales price. If the store orders 80% of the goods from the company, it will get a rebate at the end of the year. Walton followed the company's rules at first, but soon he began to deal directly with manufacturers in order to get cheaper goods and sell them at lower prices than other stores. Walton found that he bought a pair of tights for 80 cents. If the price is set at $65,438 +0, its sales will be three times that of $65,438 +0.2. Although the profit of each item is very low, the total profit has greatly increased. This is the famous "underwear theory" of Wal-Mart, which is actually what we often call "small profits but quick turnover". This concept made his store prosperous, and soon he jumped from a loss-making store to one of the best local stores.
In order to attract more customers, Walton got a popcorn machine and put it on the sidewalk in front of the store. The popcorn business is surprisingly good. So Walton borrowed money from the bank, bought an expensive ice cream machine and put it at the door. These two machines attract a lot of customers and drive the business in the store. Walton quickly paid off the $20,000 he borrowed from his father-in-law and the money for the ice cream machine, and finally owned his own shop completely.
After working in Xingang for five years, Walton achieved his original goal. 1 year, the turnover of his shop reaches $250,000 and the annual profit is $30,000 to $40,000. Not only in Arkansas, but also in six nearby States, it is the leading store of Ben Franklin's chain store.
Just when Walton's career was successful, a small oversight led to the end five years ago. Walton, who had just entered the business at that time, forgot to add a clause in the lease contract of the house, and he had the right to continue leasing after the expiration of five years. Now, five years later, the landlord was so jealous of Walton's success that he decided to take back the store and bid for the franchise of Ben Franklin's chain store. Walton had no choice but to give up and sell those shelves and inventory to the landlord at a low price. Frustration brought Walton not only resentment, but also experience and lessons. Since then, he has carefully reviewed the contract every time.
A popular Wal-Mart store
After selling the store, Walton had more than $50,000, which was enough for him to find new business opportunities. 1950, after searching everywhere, he bought a grocery store in a small town called Bentonville. After careful preparation, this self-service store named Walton Fair Price Store officially opened. This is the first self-service store in eight surrounding States. Walton advertised in the local newspaper for several days to ensure that the store had a large supply of cheap and good quality goods, and presented balloons and other gifts to the children. Unsurprisingly, customers flocked to the store and it soon became a prosperous local enterprise.
Soon, Walton began to look for opportunities to open stores in other towns. 1952, he bought an old grocery store that was about to close down in Fayetteville, and turned it into a self-help Walton cheap store, which was a great success after its opening. Then, he and his younger brother Barton Walton jointly invested in a Ben Franklin chain store in Kansas City, but the store was unfortunately razed to the ground by a tornado.
Since then, Walton, his brother and other partners have opened many chain stores in various places. He often spends all the money he earned in his last store on opening another new store. By 1960, they have become the largest independent grocery store operator in the United States. However, Walton was not satisfied. He realized that the size and sales volume of each of his stores were small. After investigation and study, he decided to open a large discount store-Wal-Mart. 1 On July 2, 962, Walton and his partners opened the first Wal-Mart store in Rogers Town, Arkansas, with a turnover of110,000 dollars a year. Two years later, they opened stores in Springdale and Harrison near Rogers. The commodity prices of these three Wal-Mart stores are generally 20% lower than those of their competitors, so they were very successful from the beginning.
To ensure that goods are cheap, it is necessary to purchase at low prices and maintain sufficient supply. At first, Wal-Mart stores encountered many difficulties. For example, the salesmen of some famous suppliers, such as Procter & Gamble and Heasman Kodak Company, rarely take the initiative to go to Wal-Mart to sell goods. Even if there is, it means to dictate the price, quantity discount and payment method of goods, which is very arrogant and rude. Walton faced these difficulties with tenacious perseverance, and gradually improved the management system of the store, so that Wal-Mart stores gradually stepped onto the formal.
Walton regards the manager of each branch as his close partner. He personally selected the right candidates, gave them a certain share in the store, fully trusted them in business activities, and gave them great power, thus making Wal-Mart operators have many excellent business talents, and Phil Green is one of them. At that time, Walton sent Phil Green to Hot Springs, Arkansas to open the 52nd Wal-Mart store. When Green came to the hot spring, he found that the prices of goods here were very high, so he decided to hold a large-scale cheap promotion to brand Wal-Mart stores. He ordered 3500 cases of detergent from a famous detergent company, and each case can get a discount of 1 USD lower than the wholesale price. So he advertised that the usual detergent of $3.97 per box would be reduced to $65,438+$0.99. Many people were shocked to see the detergent boxes piled up into a hill and thought Green was crazy. Even Walton thinks he can't sell such a huge amount of detergent. But Wharton didn't blame Green, but let him do it. As a result, all the detergents were sold out in a week. As it turns out, Phil Green was right. Since then, he has become the right-hand man of Wal-Mart.
Everything is for the customer.
Top ten business rules
Wal-Mart's business strategy is to open large discount stores in small towns that others ignore. At that time, some large companies with a national distribution system disdained to open stores in towns with a population of less than 50 thousand, while Wal-Mart opened stores in towns with only 5,000 people. The principle of opening a shop is that there must be a distribution center to take care of the relevant branches. Each branch can be under the control of the regional manager and the head office, and the distance from the distribution center should not exceed 1 day, so as to get the supply and supplement in time.
Walton expanded his company in his own way. After the stores in Arkansas were saturated, he turned to Oklahoma, then Missouri, Tennessee, Kansas and Nebraska ... He was not in a hurry to enter the big city, but first opened stores around the big city and waited for the city to develop outward. By 1980, Wal-Mart has 276 chain stores, with annual sales of1200 million dollars and net profit of 4 10/00000 dollars. Such impressive achievements mainly benefit from two aspects: internally, establishing partnership with employees; Externally, I really think about my customers everywhere.
In dealing with the relationship with employees, Walton didn't realize its importance at first, and he was very stingy with the salary of employees. When the company publicly issued shares on 1970, it only thought of managers at all levels and ignored employees. But in practice, he found that the more profits he shared with employees (salary, bonus, bonus or stock discount), the more profits the company gained. Therefore, he publicly proposed to call employees "partners" and establish a partnership with them. He implemented a dividend plan with full participation, that is, the company invested 6% of the average annual salary in this plan, and all employees who have worked in the company for more than 1 year will be credited to his account by the company according to the percentage. When employees leave the company, they can take their property with them in the form of cash or company stock. This makes Wal-Mart employees regard the store as their own career, and also makes the whole team have a strong cohesion.
As for "customer first", this is the slogan that every store will emphasize. The question is whether this is the principle that stores really follow. The goods provided by Wal-Mart stores to customers are really good and cheap. Consumers often shop around and drive to Wal-Mart. In terms of commodity display and color matching, Wal-Mart stores are also from the customer's point of view, providing convenience for customers everywhere. Sometimes the goods that customers want to buy are out of stock in this store, and the clerk will enthusiastically lead customers to other stores or even competitors' stores to buy them, so as to truly consider the customers. When Walton visits various branches, he often asks the store manager and the clerk, "If you are a customer, how can you buy what you need?" ? What other related things are you going to buy? How can I find it on the shelf? He emphasized that "retail is the detail", and only by paying attention to every detail can customers be truly satisfied.
Sam walton has formulated ten rules of business operation: 1. Dedication; 2. Share profits with all colleagues and treat them as partners; 3. motivate your partner; 4. communication; 5. Appreciate what colleagues have done for the company; Celebrate your success, but don't worry about your failure. 7. Listen to the opinions of every employee in the company and open your heart; 8. Do better than customers expect; 9. Better control of expenses than opponents; 10. Go upstream, find another way, and despise traditional ideas. Some people say that these are very common rules. Walton, on the other hand, believes that the difficulty is that you have to constantly find ways to implement these rules. He made it himself.
In view of sam walton's outstanding achievements and his enthusiastic support for education and charity, on March 1992 and 17, US President Bush and his wife went to the Wal-Mart Auditorium in Bentonville to present the successful entrepreneur with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling him "the epitome of the American dream". Sam walton, who has been fighting cancer for several years, called this award ceremony "the most brilliant moment of our entire career". On April 5th, three weeks after winning the prize, sam walton, the founder of the world's largest retail kingdom, passed away peacefully.
Today, Wal-Mart has established more than 4,900 stores in nearly 10 countries around the world, with more than10.5 million employees, and about10.40 billion people go shopping every week. From 65438 to 0996, Wal-Mart opened its first shopping mall in Shenzhen, China, and now it has established dozens of shopping malls in major cities in China. Global retail giant Wal-Mart has developed rapidly under the leadership of sam walton's successor, his eldest son robson walton.