The Peripatetic Philosopher looks at a politician:

Bernie Sanders,

You Can’t have it Both Ways!


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 20, 2016

“The Walton family of Walmart owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, Campaign speech, February 23, 2016

Note:

POLITIFACT confirms the senator’s claim, but what does it tell us?

AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL

Sam Walton was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma on March 29, 1918.  The family was constantly on the move with Sam attending eighth grade in Shelbina, Missouri, where he was the town’s youngest Eagle Scout in the state’s history. 

Sam, like most who eventually assume leadership roles, showed the aptitude early. 

Growing up in the Great Depression, now living in Columbia, Missouri, Sam did chores to help make financial ends meet for his impoverished family: he milked cows, bottled the surplus, drove that milk to customers.  

In addition, he was a paperboy for the Columbia Daily Tribune and sold magazine subscriptions.  He was voted “Most Versatile Boy” by his high school graduating class.

Think of how many young people you know today that fit this description, people who are destined to lead our country because they still have the opportunity to spread their wings and find out what they are made of.

After high school, he decided to attend college, hoping to find a way to better support his struggling family.  He attended the University of Missouri as a Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) cadet, again, doing odd jobs and waiting on tables.  He still found time to be active in extracurricular activities. 

Upon graduating in 1940 with a degree in economics, he was voted for his many services “permanent president” of his class.  

Such leadership designations often are accrued by young people in their formative years, signaling what the future is likely to hold for them and us.

Upon graduating, he joined J. C. Penney as a management trainee in DesMoines, Iowa, a position that paid $75 per month.  After 18 months with Penney’s, he was inducted into the US Army Intelligence Corps to serve in WWII, working in aircraft plant security and prisoner of war camps.        

FIRST STORE

In 1945, once the war was over, he looked around for doing something different. Penney’s still held his job for him, but he was intrigued with the variety store business, and decided to take a management position at such a store. He was 26.


Being a quick study, he decided he wanted to own his own store and innovate it in ways consistent with his ideas, and not have to follow company policy. 

With a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law and $5,000 he had saved while in the service, he purchased a Ben Franklin “Five & Dime” Store in Newport, Arkansas.
 
There, he pioneered many of the concepts that would become his brand. This included how the shelves were to be stocked, always kept full, and colorfully laid out.

His second store, just down the block, was a small department store. It just happened to be next door to his main competitor in town. He was always studying competition, observing and asking questions, a listener, not a teller; a learner, not a knower.  
He didn’t shy away from the more successful business people, but boldly confronted them to learn what their secrets were.


Success, however, has its ghosts lurking in the shadows. No enterprise is without surprises or disappointments. 

As it happens, his store was so successful that his landlord, who had a history in retail sales, refused to renew his lease desiring to reclaim the store (and franchise rights) for his son.

The landlord, however, bought Walton’s inventory at a fair price of $50,000. Using this capital, with the advice of his wife and father-in-law, he managed to purchase a small store in town, and the title to the building in a new location on downtown square of Bentonville, Arkansas. 

Opening May 9, 1950, the store was an immediate success. He was thirty-two.

TESTS AT A YOUNG AGE

Now, he had two successful but struggling stores 220 miles apart, one in Newport and the other in Bentonville. Never considering himself a good delegater, used to depending on himself to handle affairs, he found he now had to train people to adopt what became known as “the Walton way.” Many of these first employees were part of the Walton clan.

Once that was done, and both stores were hitting on all cylinders, he turned his attention to what he found most compelling, scouting out new locations and opening more Ben Franklin franchises.

Competition was great, and getting greater, as this was the zenith in the post-WWII baby boomer business expansion. It seemed that everywhere he turned he would run into a new hard charger ready to cut into his business success.


His only option, as he saw it, was to continue to grow and prosper.


True, Sam Walton had an economics degree, but he was in virgin territory with no family history in retail, and retail like every other industry was changing fast.


Young people, who wish to take a page from the Walton book, would be advised to understand that going forward often means to be limited to little more than instinct and intuition.

Having been a pilot in the war, he decided to purchase a small plane to cut down the time surveying businesses and scouting areas with but one aim, expanding the business.

By now, the Walton business was very much a family business with his brother James “Bud” and son John his direct reports, and all the women very much involved as well.

In 1954, at the age of 36, with his brother Bud, father-in-law, brother-in-law, and son, he opened a store in a shopping center in Kansas City, Missouri. From the beginning, as he hired new people, he encouraged them to set aside part of their salary to invest in the business.

Hundreds if not thousands who did so are multimillionaires today, some even billionaires.


This is for young people: imagine if you were an employee of Sam Walton, and you were not making a great deal of money, indeed, not really enough to live on, as was the case for many early Wal-Mart employees, and you were offered this opportunity and didn’t take it. Over a million former employees didn’t. 

Whom should they blame for this?

By 1962, the Walton clan owned 16 stores in Arkansas Missouri and Kansas (15 Ben Franklins and one independent in Fayetteville).

FRUITION, WAL-MART IS BORN

The first Wal-Mart store opened on July 2, 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas and was called “the Wal-Mart Discount City Store.” 

From the beginning, Sam Walton promoted American products, and had the cunning insight to see the economic advantage to have American manufacturers provide the Wal-Mart brand for the entire chain.


As technology improved, and the science of stocking and tracking sales became more sophisticated, Wal-Mart became brutal in its negotiating strategy.


Sam Walton’s wife considered the Wal-Mart brand designed for middle to lower income shoppers who lived in small towns. That was the initial condition she advocated with new stores to open in only towns of less than 20,000.


Surprisingly, that strategy held for the first decade or so.

Today, Wal-Mart is the single largest employer in the United States, and is able to negotiate the best price for its customers that is possible. 

Yes, many products are now made outside the United States, but many American families would not be able to eat as well as they do were it not for the Wal-Mart prices.


Sam Walton came from very little. He had the determination and diligence to capture the American dream, and in doing so, where is the attention?  

It is not on how the creation of the Walton wealth was possible, and what we can learn from this, but instead on the actual wealth of the family. 


Young people, imagine what this means to you. In a short three-quarters of a century, a man out of nowhere, created one of the most powerful families in the world, economically, politically, socially and personally. He did this by dint of his will, good luck, and with an ability to pay attention and stay focused on an objective.


Sam Walton died in 1992 at the age of 74 of multiple myeloma, a form of leukemia. My da died of the same disease in 1958, three days past his 50th birthday. It is a bad actor and to this day there is no cure for the disease.


If interested in a candid story of this man, I recommend “Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story,” by Sam Walton with John Huey, Doubleday, New York, 1992.

FINAL COMMENT

Were Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist, to rule as President of the United States, it would be impossible for the Sam Waltons of America to ever rise above the poverty status into national, and indeed, international prominence.  What Sam Walton accomplished is one of the reasons masses of people across the globe rush to the American shores.


There were three things that the America that Sam Walton fought to preserve in World War Two that still remained viable when he was Honorably Discharged from the US Army:


(1) It was possible for him to use his mind, heart and energy to create something long lasting;

(2) There were few roadblocks to that opportunity as long as he stayed within the dictates of the law; and

(3) There was no need for him to feel embarrassed or guilty for the success earned.

Take away the drive, the leadership, the risk taking, the failures that lead to successes, and you cut the heart out of America. The Walton family has been diligent giving back to the United States.


It is the American mind employed that makes a difference, a mind that earns its way as it goes, and goes as it earns.

It may be a rallying cry at Bernie Sanders’ political rallies to make the Walton Family seem like a pariah, but imagine where those hundreds of thousands of Americans would be working today if Wal-Mart did not exist. 

Imagine, too, what food prices would be if there was no Wal-Mart in the supermarket competitive business.


You can’t have it both ways. A welfare state is a nation that believes you can get something for nothing when the nothing that is something is arbitrary confinement to the wishes of the state.  This is a truism that never changes.