Founded by Sam Walton, the first Wal-Mart store opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962. Seventeen years later, annual sales topped $1 billion. By the end of January 2002, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. was the world's largest retailer, with $218 billion in sales. .
Wal-Mart's winning strategy in the U.S. was based on selling branded products at low cost. Each week, about 100 million customers visited a Wal-Mart store somewhere in the world. The company employed more than 1.3 million associates worldwide through more than 3,200 stores in the United States and more than 1,100 units in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, China, Korea, Germany, and the United Kingdom. (The first international store opened in Mexico City in 1991.).
In 2001, Fortune magazine named Wal-Mart the third most admired company in America, and the Financial Times and PricewaterhouseCoopers ranked it as the eighth most admired company in the world. The following year, Wal-Mart was named number one on the Fortune 500 list and was presented with the Ron Brown Award for Corporate Leadership, a presidential award that recognized companies for outstanding achievement in employee and community relations.
Wal-Mart enjoyed a 50 percent market share position in the discount retail industry. Procter & Gamble, Clorox, and Johnson & Johnson were among its nearly 3,000 suppliers. Though Wal-Mart may have been the top customer for consumer product manufacturers, it deliberately ensured it did not become too dependent on any one supplier; no single vendor constituted more than 4 percent of its overall purchase volume. Further, Wal-Mart had persuaded its suppliers to have electronic "hook-ups" with its stores.
About 85 percent of all the merchandise sold by Wal-Mart was shipped through its distribution system to its stores. Wal-Mart used a saturation strategy for store expansion. The standard was to be able to drive from a distribution center to a store within a day.