How Walmart became the World's Largest Company

On July 2, 1962, the first Wal-Mart (WMT 0.10%) store in the world opened its doors in Rogers, Arkansas. Sam Walton, the man who founded Wal-Mart, had been a store for more than 20 years at this point in his life. In 1940, he began his career as a manager trainee in a J.C. Penney (JCPN.Q) store in Iowa. To a large extent, Penney's emphasis on maximizing the value of a customer's visit explains Walton's lifetime fascination with improving the experiences in his own stores through research and observation. Despite losing its founder, Wal-Mart kept expanding quickly. The business experienced its first-ever week of $1 billion in corporate sales a year after Walton's passing. By 1997, when the company's dominance among American merchants earned it a seat on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI -0.45%), sales had doubled to nearly $100 billion. After Sears left the Dow two years later, Wal-Mart became the sole consumer retail business, and it has remained such ever since. In 2002, Wal-Mart, with $220 billion in yearly sales, overtook General Motors as the largest firm in America by revenue. Wal-Mart increased its annual income by double over the ensuing ten years, and it appears that it may soon become the first firm in American history to achieve annual sales of half a trillion dollars. That’s it for today’s video. Please like the video and subscribe the channel for future updates.