Sam Walton’s landlord took away his best store and gave it to his son. So he moved to a tiny town called Bentonville

In 1950, Sam Walton’s landlord in Newport decided not to renew his lease. He gave the location to his own son instead. The store was doing too well. Under Walton, its sales had grown from $80,000 to $225,000 in three years.

Walton and his wife, Helen, bought a Ben Franklin five-and-dime franchise in Newport and opened it on September 1, 1945. He had been discharged from the army that year. Before that came a business degree from the University of Missouri, a job with J. C. Penney, and a stint at a DuPont gunpowder plant in Oklahoma, where he met Helen.

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The Newport store is where he worked out his main idea. If you cut your price, you sell more, and the extra volume can earn you more than the higher price would have.

Retailers call this lowering your markup, the gap between what a shop pays for an item and what it charges. A smaller gap on many more sales can leave you with more money.

Then the lease ended. The Waltons moved to Bentonville on May 1, 1950.

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Eight days later, with help from his father-in-law, Walton had bought the Harrison Variety store and opened it with a one-day remodeling sale. It was still a Ben Franklin, but he named it Walton’s 5 & 10. It was the third self-service variety store in the country and the first in Arkansas. In a self-service store, the clerk doesn’t fetch goods for you. You look over the shelves yourself and take what you want to the counter.

Discounting only works with a lot of customers, and Bentonville had about 3,000 people. Walton’s answer was more small towns.

In 1952 he opened a Ben Franklin in Fayetteville, 25 miles south, and soon another. His brother Bud joined to help launch and run the stores. By the early 1960s the Waltons owned sixteen Ben Franklin stores across Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas. It was the largest chain of independently owned variety stores in the country.

Towns that far apart were hard to manage, so Walton learned to fly. He wrote that they could never have kept control of operations and communications without visiting stores regularly. He also used the plane to scout locations.

Meanwhile, discounting was spreading through American retail. Kmart, Woolco, Gibson’s and Zayre’s had all taken it up. Walton asked Ben Franklin to cut its margins by half. The company refused.

From one store in Rogers to $100 billion in sales

So Walton went ahead alone. He opened the first Wal-Mart in Rogers on July 2, 1962.

Growth needed fresh money, and Walmart was incorporated in 1969. By January 31, 1970, he and Bud owned eighteen Walmart stores and fourteen Ben Franklins. That year the company sold 300,000 shares to the public. By 1976 every Ben Franklin was closed. There were 330 Walmart stores by the end of 1980, and 1,573 by 1990, with annual sales of $25.8 billion.

In 1991 Walmart became the country’s largest retailer, with 1,700 stores. On January 12, 1997, it passed $100 billion in sales. That figure is revenue, not profit, and it came almost five years after Walton’s death.

Critics had their own numbers. A 1995 study of thirty-four small communities found that local businesses in towns with a Walmart saw sales fall a combined 25.4 percent over five years. Other studies suggested that roads, water and sewer services for Walmart sites cost more than the new tax revenue.

Employees, called associates, were offered stock options. Stories of long-serving hourly workers with six-figure retirement accounts are common. At his death, Walton’s net worth was estimated at $21 billion to $23 billion.

Walton died of cancer in Little Rock on April 5, 1992. He is buried in the Bentonville Cemetery, directly behind Walmart’s headquarters.