Sam Walton
The globally famous Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. was founded by Sam Walton, and after decades of struggle became the world's largest retailing empire, topping the Fortune Global 500 list in 2001. Sam Walton's wealth achieved so quickly, in fact, is very simple, that is: low prices, low prices, and low prices.
Walking into Wal-Mart's front door, the first thing that comes to mind is the slogan "Everyday Prices, Always Prices", which is also printed on Wal-Mart's shopping bags. There is a fundamental difference between daily prices and general price cuts and concessions, it is to sell low prices as a long-term marketing tool, insisting that every kind of goods should be cheaper than other stores. This guiding principle makes Wal-Mart become the cost control expert in this industry, because only by minimizing the cost can we really achieve the daily flat price. Wal-Mart's low cost mainly relies on the following aspects:
(1) Adopt warehouse operation. Wal-Mart stores are simply decorated and goods are mostly in large packages.
(2) Strengthening cooperation with suppliers. Due to the large purchasing volume, generally from the factory directly into the goods, through the computer networking, to realize the information **** enjoy, the supplier can be the first time to understand Wal-Mart's sales and inventory, timely arrangements for production and transportation.
(3) powerful distribution centers and communication equipment for technical support. Wal-Mart has the nation's largest private satellite communications system and the largest private transport fleet, all the stores' computers and headquarters are connected to the general stores to send orders within 24 to 48 hours, you can receive the goods sent by the distribution center. Such quick information feedback and efficient inventory management has led to a significant reduction in inventory, faster capital turnover, and naturally lower costs.
(4) Strict control of overhead. Wal-Mart's overhead is 2% of the company's sales, while the industry average is 5%.
(5) Reduce advertising costs. Wal-Mart believes that keeping everyday flat prices is the best advertising, and it has the lowest advertising costs but the largest sales among its retail peers. Wal-Mart to provide customers with superb service in and "daily prices" and the same level of strategic importance. Wal-Mart declared: "We strive to make sure you are satisfied with every item. If you're not satisfied, you can return it within a month and get your full purchase price back." Wal-Mart is able to do this not only because it tries to source local, name-brand, quality products while keeping prices flat, and the quality of its merchandise is guaranteed, but more importantly, because it believes that it costs five times more to recapture a customer than to keep an existing one.
(1918-1992)
In the last 50 years of the 20th century, there was no one who brought the American Dream to vibrant life more than Sam Walton. After decades of struggle, Sam Walton developed an unassuming grocery retail store in the small town of Bentonville, Arkansas, into Wal-Mart, the king of global retailing and the world's No. 1 company with more than 4,000 chain stores.
Wal-Mart is the world's largest retail company, his president, Sam Walton, was diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia in 1982, when Wal-Mart had more than a billion dollars in turnover; Walton was diagnosed with malignant bone marrow cancer in 1989, in 1990, he made a plan for Wal-Mart's next 10 years, by the year 2000, the company's sales will reach 129 billion dollars. By 2000, the company's sales would reach $129 billion, making it the world's most
powerful retailer, and he achieved his goal. But he passed away in 1992.
Walton often said that money, after a certain threshold, is less important. What matters is the size of the business.
The imminence of death tends to sharpen one's thinking.
This was true for Sam Walton, whose seemingly minor incident on a sunny November day in 1989 in a remote part of Rio Grande, Texas, made Sam realize how short life was for him.
Walton had spent the day traversing the ranch prairie, hunting quail. When he returns, he finds that he has locked himself out of an igloo at one end of the campground.
Walton and Hiller were standing outside his igloo when Walton noticed a small window was open, so the skinny man climbed up on the cowboy's shoulders and tried to get in through it, which he succeeded in doing, but the hound dog that had been barking in his ear got caught in the window and bumped into his chest.
The next morning he still felt the pain, but he didn't care and went hunting anyway. At the end of the day, he still felt the pain, and it extended to his upper arm, much worse than the ones he had felt for months that he couldn't tell where they were. There was no way around it, and Walton thought it best to get himself checked out by a doctor. He boarded the one he had bought a couple years ago? used, of course? twin-engine Cessna small plane and flew to Houston.
In 1982, Walton was diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia, a blood cancer that destroys white blood cells in the body's blood. Since then, he has been traveling back and forth to Houston for medical treatment. Walton has always been active and energetic. He often woke up early and worked long hours before dawn. But that year, he felt more and more tired and weak every day. At first, he thought it might be a heavy workload, as his wife Helen kept complaining. So, despite the pain the illness was causing him, he began delegating more work, pared down his busy travel schedule and tried to relax himself by hunting and playing tennis.
Even that didn't help. So Walton had to go in for a full and thorough checkup, even though he had never liked going to the doctor. Doctors in Arkansas found that his white blood cell count was disturbingly low. They told him he had been suffering from a chronic form of leukemia for at least six or seven years. They didn't know what caused it. They didn't know if it was possible to cure it. But Walton had access to the best medical care money could buy, so they suggested he go to M.D. Anderson's hospital in Houston, one of the best cancer research centers in the country. There, an oncologist named George Quesada was conducting experimental treatments for hairy leukemia using interferon, an extraordinarily expensive substance carefully extracted from white blood cells. At the time, it would take 300 donors to provide enough interferon to treat one patient for three months, and that would cost about $10,000 a month.
Queseda is not the type to hide the truth. According to him, the standard treatment would have been to remove Walton's spleen and then follow it up with chemotherapy. But, he told the unfortunate patient, that course of treatment also had only a 25 percent success rate? This success meant nothing more than a guarantee that the patient would live for at least another five years? Walton had always had an aversion to having surgery, but he had always been combative. Surgery, he said flatly, was out of the question. So what was the alternative?
In fact there was only one other alternative. Quesada said he could become a patient receiving interferon research treatment. That could be risky, such as the possibility of hemorrhaging or infection; there are also potential side effects, including flu symptoms and fatigue. But even though Quesada had administered interferon therapy to fewer than ten hairy-cell leukemia patients up to that point, it was clear that he showed a great deal of enthusiasm for his initial achievement. He told Walton that it looked like it would help patients maintain their white blood cell count and would strengthen their immune systems at the same time. He added that this is an experimental treatment and so far, despite the encouraging results, it's still in its infancy. Regardless, he shrugged, the worst that could happen is that this treatment doesn't work at all, and they could reconsider surgery and chemotherapy.
Being the subject of experimental medical treatment?Walton wasn't too interested in that either, he needed to think about it. "He mostly wanted to make sure the treatment wouldn't interfere with his particularly busy work schedule." Quesada later recalled. Walton flew home to Bentonville to tell Helen about his current situation and also published a letter in the October 1982 issue of Wal-Mart World, the company's in-house newsletter. In the letter, in which he told the company's 41,000 employees of his diagnosis, he downplayed the severity of his illness with his usual earnestness and simplicity, saying that in all other respects, he was still in good health.
The casual attitude adopted in his letter hardly reflected his true feelings. In business, he can make all sorts of decisions quickly, with a keen intuition honed by years of experience. But this case was different, and he was at a complete loss. He'd spent an entire month considering what to do before flying to Houston anyway to ask more questions about the treatment. Quesada greeted him with new news: the doctors had discovered how to use genetic engineering to select artificial interferon, making the substance easier to obtain-if not, I'm afraid that for Walton, the availability of interferon would have already been a problem. Walton rigorously questioned Quesada and the other doctors about the risks such a treatment might entail, as well as the benign effects it might produce. Quesada bluntly told him that because the drug was so new, there was still much to be learned. Walton went home and thought about it for another long month before finally deciding he wanted to try the treatment.
He learned how to inject himself and how to ask someone else to do it for him. His entire course of treatment required daily injections of interferon for the first six months and three weekly injections for the other six months. Not even halfway through the treatment, the disease was under control, the leukemia was slowly fading, and then it stopped bothering him.
It was amazing how easy it all became.
That was about seven years ago. Since then, the leukemia hadn't actually bothered him, though he continued to go to Quesada a few times a year for checkups. He even went to the doctor three months before this hunt. Quesada had drawn attention to subtle changes in Walton's white blood cells, but he hadn't been able to identify the cause because Walton had been reluctant to linger for three days so that Dr. Quesada could put into practice what he had in his head.
Now, when Walton showed up with strange pains in his chest and arms, the doctors took some bone marrow from his hip and, through laboratory analysis, found that he had a malignant cancer of the bone marrow, multiple myeloma.
This time, Quesada's prediction was even harsher; there was no cure. It's a far more challenging disease, he said. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy could potentially make it subside, but keeping it from coming back would be too difficult.
Treatment would also be tougher. Walton does not suffer from serious side effects from interferon therapy. But Quesada warns that he should be prepared for radiation therapy as well as chemotherapy to deplete his function. Unless he's lucky, the disease itself can bring painful sensations, sometimes severe. His bones are already damaged and fragile. He would become weaker and more easily fatigued.
Walton was more confident in Quesada than he had been the first time. Still, he carefully asked the doctor a variety of questions. Were there other treatments that were a little more natural than what they might want to try?Other than that, chemotherapy and radiation sounded like they would be too time-consuming. With the help of his family, and especially his son John, whose daughter also has cancer, Walton researched different treatments, asking his doctors about natural remedies, unconventional treatments, vitamins, and anything else that might replace or minimize chemotherapy and radiation.
He contacted Cancer Fighters, an Iowa nonprofit organization that provides cancer patients with information about cancer research and treatments, including non-medical alternatives. A clearinghouse for information about cancer research and treatments, including therapies other than medicine. Walton has always been an organized person, otherwise he wouldn't be where he is today. However, he soon learned that bone marrow cancer would undoubtedly be fatal. In the end, Walton had no choice but to undergo conventional chemotherapy and radiation.
What was Walton's reaction to the fact that death would come at any moment? He had always been enthusiastic, a morale booster for his staff, from which he derived obvious pleasure; he turned all his conversations with sales clerks into pep rallies; yet he was a particularly reluctant person to share his thoughts and feelings. He almost never talked about himself, except sometimes with Helen. Helen, too, like him, was a very tight-lipped person. William H. Enfield, Walton's longtime friend of more than 40 years, said something like, "On a personal level, I probably know Helen and Sam better than anyone here, but there's still a lot I don't know about them, and I've never tried to find out."
Assumptions drive Walton to reexamine his own life, wondering if he would have slowed down his life a little sooner and spent more time with Helen and the children; or if he should have been gentler with the people who poured their hearts and souls into building his retail empire. These visions are tempting indeed.
Tempting, but probably wrong. Eventually, as death grows closer, Walton does admit that his late-night questions about survival begin to arise. But finally, these seem to have only just begun to fade quickly.
These were to come later. After his diagnosis, he went back to hunting bigger quail.
Money, Walton often said, is less important after a certain threshold.
He was cool about his wealth. This public image was further confirmed by reports of his reaction to a stock market crash.
Stock market conditions plummeted on Oct. 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 508 points in one day and Wal-Mart's stock fell 32 percent from the price it had been trading at a week earlier, leaving Walton with a net loss of $1.7 billion. Walton had gone to Little Rock that day to give a press conference on higher education with leaders of a number of other Arkansas companies. When he arrived at Mayor Bill Clinton's office, a reporter asked him about his reaction to the stock market plunge.
"Money is nothing but pieces of paper," he said, looking as if he was calm. "It was when we started and it's been the same since."
Money doesn't matter as much as the size of the business. His goals were ever so audacious. in 1976, sales at the 125 retail stores totaled $343 million that year. Walton had confidently and publicly promised that within five years he would triple sales to what they are now. "You can write it on the wall now if you want." He told Janet Ritis. Ritis, a writer, was writing a feature on Walton for Financial World. "By January 31, 1981, we'll reach $1 billion in turnover." As it turned out, Wal-Mart reached $1.25 billion in turnover a year ahead of his scheduled date.
By 1985, Wal-Mart posted its $6.4 billion in sales, still behind Kmart ($22 billion) and Sears ($25.03 billion), and by this time Walton and Glass were already talking openly about becoming the nation's largest retailer.
Now in 1990, Walton is starting to plan for Wal-Mart's next 10 years. He saw no problem catching up with Sears and Kmart, and could do it in the next two years. He was so sure of it that he might live to see it with his own eyes. He's more interested in the potential-exploitation aspect regarding Wal-Mart.
The next year, at his annual convention, he announced to jubilant stockholders with confidence his calculations: whether he was still alive or not, by the year 2000, Wal-Mart's sales were to more than quintuple to $129 billion a year -- far outpacing both Sears and Kmart, and thus becoming the most powerful retailer in the world. powerful retailer in the world.
Now, his goal has been realized.