I think it was Tai that was spamming/scamming my
youtube or something that made me aware of this book. He basically said, if you want to be an
entrepreneur, how could you not know/read about the man who made Walmart. I guess that was a convincing argument.
I had this book on my wishlist for a while, then
one day my BookBub daily e-mail alert had this book on sale for $1.99… So I bought it… Buying a lot of books…
I don’t think this book was inspiring in an
entrepreneurial way. However, what is
really interesting is to read the story of Walmart from its early days – how it
was operated, the beliefs, the struggles, the strategy… That baby Walmart is a very different one
than the one I grew up and knew about.
Seeing how the tides have turned, seeing how the culture is different
now compared to then… Very
fascinating and very interesting.
The most interesting for me was seeing the
relationship between Walmart and P&G change over time. From the beginning of the book, P&G didn’t
care about Walmart. After Walmart
increased in size, the two became good business partners near the end of the
book. Even later than in the book, one
of my college professors was describing a negotiation deal on operating
efficiency between Walmart and P&G.
Walmart expects its suppliers to have margin improvements and economies
of scale. So after a certain amount of
time, they will come, sit you down, and give you a new (lower) price. And there’s nothing you can do about it
besides nod and say thanks. Who knows, I
wasn’t there. But even with
exaggeration, seeing this relationship take a complete 180 shift is also
thought provoking for me. And fun fact: P&G sells more product
to Walmart than to all of Japan…
And finally, I’ll end with a quote from the book
with Sam Walton commenting about how 76 of the top 100 discount stores in 1976
went out of business:
It
all boils down to not taking care of their customers, not minding their stores,
not having folks in their stores with good attitudes, and that was because they
never really even tried to take care of their own people. If you want the people in the stores to take
care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people
in the stores. That’s the most important
single ingredient of Wal-Mart’s success.
Does
that still apply to the Walmart today?
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