Michele and I came to Bentonville to see an art show but we ended up staying longer because of the draw of the greater Bentonville area. It is a company town that feels like it is booming; sprawling out in a new, high-tech, suburban world (the tallest building we saw in the sprawl was the Tata Consulting Group Tower at, maybe, six stories). Also, I had never been to a Walmart before and this seemed like my best chance.

Never having been in a Walmart before is something I’m no longer particularly proud of. Walmart has been a huge influence on American culture in general and an even bigger influence on retail business. For as long as I can remember reading about Walmart, I’ve read that Walmart’s influence has been 100% negative (except for a couple of fictional Walmart visits in Reamde). Now, in Bentonville, everything I read says that Walmart’s influence has been 100% positive. In reality, it seems to me that both are true (except for the 100% part).

Without going into the boring details, Sam Walton didn’t come out of nowhere, as being born in Kingfisher Oklahoma implies, his dad was a banker and, while they weren’t rich, they were certainly upper middle class, and he got his first store, a Ben Franklin 5 and 10 franchise, with a $20,000 loan – a lot in 1945, about $260,000 today – from his father in law. That store did so well that the landlord wouldn’t renew the lease, taking over the space (there were probably all kinds of lessons, on both sides, there). He started a new store in Rogers – shown twice in the previous post for some strange reason – that is now the entrance to the Walton Museum (so that, strangely, we enter through the gift shop as Michele commented). Walton’s plan, according to the legend and the Museum, was to have every day low prices instead of sales and a huge assortment of stuff in one store, especially in underserved rural areas.

While his second store was in downtown Rodgers, he soon started putting the stores on cheap lots out of town, resulting, or at least contributing to, the decimation of hundreds of small towns. Sam Walton also pioneered screwing over labor and mainlined, as one article put it, the acceptance of workforce abuse. He amassed 15 Ben Franklin stores before he started Wal-Mart Discount City in 1962 (Wal-Mart Discount City then became Wal-Mart and, in 2018, they changed the name to Walmart). In 15 years, he had 190 stores, all within a one day drive, with their own trucks, from a distribution center, in 30, he was the richest person in America and the family is now worth about 140 billion.

To me, the most surprising and impressive thing about wandering around greater Walmart town is that Sam Walton died in 1992 and company hasn’t withered like, say, Sears, it has continued to grow and to innovate. Walmart is going to give Amazon a run for the money.

Michele and I had come to a Walmart Supercenter – think of a regular Walmart in an XXL size – to scoff at the endless array of cheap shit for sale, but I, at least, left more impressed than I expected (and more impressed than I wanted to be). Yeah, they had lots of cheap electric griddles, but they also had the best collection of Lodge cast iron pots and pans that I’ve seen – and that includes Williams Sonoma and Sur La Table – and they even had my favorite razor, Harry’s. And everything was cheap (and you can get your taxes done).

After about an hour at the Super Center, during which we bought a lens cleaning micro-cloth and a large box of Zeiss lens cleaners, we left the Walmart Super Center, drove by the Walmart Culinary And Innovation Center, turned onto Walton Boulevard, and drove towards Eureka Springs. Past several large areas of McMansions, the landscape changed, growing rural and wild.