Home of the World's Largest Retailer

by Marti Attoun

It’s still dark when Becky Hedden stakes her Saturday morning spot on the town square in Bentonville, Ark., heaping tables with homegrown and home-sewn goodies: garden tomatoes, elderberry jelly, bib aprons.

“I get up at 3 so I can get here first and get the best spot—the shadiest,” says Hedden, 49, as she prepares for the arrival of the first farmers’ market customers.

Savvy retailing? You bet. Bentonville is famous for it. A few feet away is where Sam Walton opened Walton’s 5 & 10 on May 9, 1950, and created the world’s largest retailer—Wal-Mart. At corporate headquarters south of the square, some 12,000 employees oversee 3,437 U.S. stores and 1,301 foreign stores. Sales in 2002 topped $244.5 billion.

Main Street meets Wall Street at every turn in this Ozarks boomtown, where population signs are outdated as soon as they’re posted and company stock prices are tracked like the daily temperature.

“We’re growing like crazy. We’re adding about 1,000 families a month,” says Ed Clifford, president and CEO of the Bentonville/Bella Vista Chamber of Commerce. “It’s hard to separate Wal-Mart from Bentonville and Bentonville from Wal-Mart. Everyone in town is connected to Wal-Mart—at least with stock.”

Bentonville is Arkansas’ fastest-growing city of more than 10,000 population—from 19,730 in 2000 to 24,086 in 2002—and is in the nation’s sixth fastest-growing metropolitan statistic area. The Milken Institute ranked this northwest Arkansas corner as the nation’s strongest regional economy. Unemployment is 2 percent.

More than 500 companies that do business with Wal-Mart have located in Bentonville and neighboring communities since 1995.

“We’re still small-town, but we have original townies and new people. We have so much diversity,” says Cindy Suter, director of the Bentonville Public Library. “Basically, if you have a product in a Wal-Mart store, you’ll have a vendor in town. If you sell peanuts to Wal-Mart, you’re selling to the world.”

Adds Clifford, “Take the Fortune 500 companies in consumer products and just start down the list. General Electric, Clorox, Anheuser-Busch . . .”

The 2-year-old high school is being doubled. Three elementary schools will be built within three years. Commercial development worth $1.2 billion is going up on a 1.25-mile stretch of U.S. 540.

But along with the grind of bulldozers is the hum of small-town life centered on the town square guarded by a 1908 statue of Confederate Gov. James H. Berry. This is the Friday night gathering spot where residents snap open lawn chairs, spread blankets and relax under the stars as they listen to bluegrass and gospel music. The public library is housed in the 1909 restored Massey Hotel, in space given to the city by Walton Enterprises.

“People are so friendly here,” says Lee Schmidt, 63, a Wisconsin native who transferred to Bentonville in 1995 to manage a restaurant, retired and stayed. Schmidt peddles his homemade salad dressing at the farmers’ market, held on the town square since the 1970s.

Friendliness and unpretentiousness are part of the Wal-Mart culture that Walton lived and promoted. His former 5 & 10 with the candy-cane-striped awning is now the Wal-Mart Visitor’s Center and chronicles company history. Walton opened his first Wal-Mart in 1962 in nearby Rogers, putting big-city retailing concepts into small towns: volume movement of goods, lowest prices, customer satisfaction.

The concept worked. Wal-Mart stock sold for $16.50 a share when the company went public in 1970. A hundred shares bought then would have grown to 204,800 shares worth more than $12.2 million today.

“This is where we began—in small towns—and it’s appropriate that we stay in small towns,” says Sharon Weber, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. “Our roots are here.”

Parked inside the visitor’s center is Walton’s 1979 Ford pickup with a dinged fender and his corporate office, which was re-assembled here after his death in 1992. The flashiest décor is a poster-sized photo of his hunting dog. Nearby is the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, presented to Walton by former President George Bush, who described Walton as genuine, generous, and “an illustration of the American dream.”

Clifford adds his own description of the company that Walton founded. “I’d say they’re the best corporate neighbor I’ve ever heard about.”

Marti Attoun is a freelance writer in Joplin, Mo.

first appeared: 3/21/2004