ColdFusion - How BIG is Walmart? (2.2 million employees!)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are watching Coldfuton TV. Hi, welcome to another Coldfustin video. Degogo here. So far in the How Big series, we've seen the size of Google, Samsung Group, Tesla, and Facebook Incorporated. All of those companies were either massive or highly innovative.

Starting point is 00:00:22 But to go bigger than even Samsung, we have to travel outside the realm of technology entirely. Prepare to meet one of the biggest giants in companies, Walmart. Ever heard of it? Well, let me jog your memory. Walmart is a multinational retail store that has 2.2 million employees. That's almost 10% of the entire Australian population. Yep, one out of every 10 people in Australia. In addition to this, 90% of all Americans live within 15 miles of a Walmart. So how did all of this happen? In this video, we'll take a look at how the company began

Starting point is 00:00:59 and then look at some interesting facts about the company and finally we'll take a look at Walmart's mind-blowing size. The story of Walmart is really a testament to just one man, Sam Walton. Born in 1918, Sam was a small town boy growing up on a farm in Oklahoma. Later on, during the Great Depression, Sam's family moved to Missouri. During college, he was noted as being a very versatile boy and one of the rare people that knew all the janitors by their first name. Later on, Sam would carry these same values of respecting everyone, no matter what they look like or who they were, into Walmart. I personally would like to see many of our people settle down in Walmarts like Bentonville, Arkansas, for instance, and plant their roots and

Starting point is 00:01:53 get their home paid for and become leaders in their community. In 1942, he served in World War II as a security supervisor and rose to the rank of captain. After the war in 1945, at the age of 26, Sam ran a chain of variety stores and was extremely successful. And by 1962, he opened up his first store under the Walmart name in Arkansas. This store strongly carried Sam's belief in small town values and a strong sense of community. But as you would expect, it wasn't all smooth sailing. Here's how the first opening day of Walmart went, according to an eyewitness back in 1962. I thought to myself, this is absolutely the worst discount store or retail store that I've ever seen.

Starting point is 00:02:38 Sam bought a couple of truckloads of watermelons, and he'd stacked them up across the front of the store. He had donkey rides for the kids out on the parking lot, and what he didn't anticipate is that the temperature was about 110 degrees in Harrison that day, and the watermelons began to pop, and that watermelon juice began to run over the parking lot, and the donkeys did what donkeys do. You can imagine what it looked like. The thing I didn't realize about Sam, though, and the people who were involved in those early days in Walmart is that they had a quality that I haven't seen in many people

Starting point is 00:03:13 or in many companies. And that was that there was never a day went by that they didn't improve something. The 1970s was the decade of growth for Walmart, and by 1979, they had reached their first billion-dollar year. The company's ethos was to provide the lowest prices in retail for rural areas. In the 1980s, the company really didn't look back. Walmart took over many other discount stores and franchises.

Starting point is 00:03:40 As an indication of its size, in 1987, Walmart had built the largest private satellite communications network in the whole of the United States. Despite the immense growth and old age, Sam made it his mission to visit as many Walmart stores as he could. Sadly, Sam passed in 1992 and towards the end of the 20th century, Walmart had completely lost that small town feel and had drifted its focus to benefit more effective business practices. As a result, they became the absolute giants we know of today. Today Walmart is ridiculously large, much bigger than Sam Walton could have ever imagined.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Here are some facts to put things into perspective. At Walmart, Americans spend $36 million every hour, every day. This works out to $21,000 of profit every minute with a profit margin of 6%. Strangely enough, in the year 2000, Walmart was sued a total of 4,851 times, or about once every two hours. The average family of four spends over $4,000 a year at Walmart. Okay, so that's just the surface. We see that Walmart is absolutely huge, but let's dig a little bit deeper. How big is Walmart exactly? Well, Walmart brought in $485 billion revenue in 2014,

Starting point is 00:05:09 which is $20 billion more than Austria's GDP. Walmart topped ExxonMobil in the Fortune 500 for a second year, making more revenue than Apple, Target, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Macy's and Walt Disney combined. For a perspective, Walmart makes $180 billion more than, Samsung in revenue. If Walmart were a country it would be the 26th largest economy in the world. One in every four dollars American spend on groceries is spent at Walmart. Just in one week Walmart serves more than 200 million customers at more than 10,400 stores in 27 countries. So how big is Walmart physically?

Starting point is 00:05:52 Well if he added up all the store space it would stretch over 900 million square feet. That's 150% bigger than Manhattan. Walmart's parking lots alone take up roughly the size of Tampa, Florida. Four of the ten richest Americans are Walton family members. They're worth more than $30 billion each, according to Bloomberg billionaire's index. And finally, the last fact of all, Australia doesn't even have a Walmart. Okay, so hopefully you start to see the real size of Walmart here, it might have been a little bit bigger than you first would have thought. I was actually surprised at some of those facts myself.

Starting point is 00:06:34 So what do we take away from all of this? Well once again, as we've seen in other videos, the determination and perseverance of just a single soul can really make an incredible difference. Also if you look at it, when a company starts buying and taking over the competition in such a manner as Walmart does, I think we're beginning to reach the size of too big. Anyway, I want to thank you for watching and hopefully have learned something from this video. And if you did, please feel free to subscribe to my channel. There's plenty of other interesting stuff on here.

Starting point is 00:07:05 So that's enough for me. This has been Dugogo. Thanks for watching Colfustin and I'll catch you again soon for the next video. Cheers guys.

ColdFusion - How BIG is Walmart? (2.2 million employees!)

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