This August, I will celebrate my four-year anniversary of my being employed by the World's largest retailer. Since 1996, I have worked for Wal-Mart Store #1404, in Lake Zurich. I have worked in most of the different departments and have a fairly vast knowledge of the store. The next rung on the ladder would be for me to become a department manager and then try to become a management trainee, and finally an assistant manager. .
When I stressed my interest in retailing, it was suggested that I use my job background and write about Wal-Mart. More specifically, "Has Wal-Mart gotten too big?" At first it seemed like an easy paper to write, I could rely on my time there and what knowledge I had of the store. I soon realized that while I knew a lot about Wal-Mart at a store level, I was clueless when I tried to look at it from both the retailing and corporate point of view. If I chose to write this paper based on my own my own experiences, I knew that this paper would be a biased point of view of the company. To truly answer the question posed, I needed to look at the question from all angles.
To start out, let us look at Wal-Mart's sales. When Sam Walton retired as CEO in 1988, the company had sales of $16 billion. Now only 12 years later, those sales have multiplied more than tenfold. The sales for this past year were reported at $165 billion. They first hit the $1 billion mark in sales in 1980. They amazingly reached the $100 billion mark in sales in 1996, in only 16 years. They are on track to break $200 billion within the next year or two.
In regards to expansion, the amount of stores that the company has is staggering. They currently have 2,985 stores in the United Sates of America. These include their Discount Stores, Supercenters, and SAM"S Clubs. Internationally, Wal-Mart has another 1,004 stores. This brings their grand total to 3,989 stores, in the United Sates and in ten other countries (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Korea, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom.