Five Things You Didn’t Know About Wal-Mart
Ross Bonander: The first Wal-Mart opened in Arkansas in 1962, and the company flourished, thanks to the retail imagination and cutthroat practices of founder Sam Walton. Over four decades later, Wal-Mart is a global behemoth, regularly seeing annual sales in excess of $300 billion, and employing more people — 1.9 million, according to business research company Hoover’s Inc. — than any other private employer in the world. If Wal-Mart were its own country, its population would exceed 75 other countries as the 146th most populated nation on Earth.
Love it or hate it, here are five things you didn’t know about Wal-Mart; your friendly neighborhood retail monstrosity.
1. Every week, over one-third of the U.S. population visits a Wal-Mart
In a country of over 300 million, that comes to an astonishing 100 million Wal-Mart customers per week (127 million if you believe the figure given on the corporate website). Of course, this does not mean 100 million unique customers; that number is unknown, and for this purpose, immaterial. Either way, that’s about as many Americans who voted in the tight U.S. Presidential elections of 2004 (122 million), and it’s substantially more than the number who could have voted but didn’t (78 million).
