walmart locations in the united states

To bring about such extraordinary coordination, Walmart devotes significant resources to the development, maintenance, refinement and synchronization of its distribution and data networks. [7] The company keeps track of every item every customer buys for two years and stores this information in two data centers near its headquarters in Bentonville. Walmart uses this massive amount of information — only the U.S. Department of Defense collects more — to monitor consumer behavior and develop predictive purchasing and distribution models. [8] The transmission of this data is then enabled by Walmart’s large satellite network and its proprietary intra-net, RetailLink. Walmart was also an early proponent of the Universal Product Code,

Diagram illustrating the recommended location of barcodes on various products. [Credit: Lawrence Hicks, The Universal Product Code (New York: Amacom, 1975)]

LogisticsSam Walton (1918–1992) founded Walmart in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas, based on a low-price/high-volume business model. By selling things cheaper, Walton could sell more of them and generate profit through volume rather than through high markup. This approach has proven spectacularly successful — yet it relies on narrow margins that must be vigilantly maintained and constantly improved. As a result Walmart strives constantly to reduce costs. The company negotiates relentlessly with suppliers and its leadership puts tremendous pressure on store managers to achieve maximum profitability. Much of this has been driven by Sam Walton’s obsession with individual stores’ weekly performance data, which he would review every Saturday morning with his executives and managers in order to root out inefficiencies, either within their own operations or those of suppliers. Through this sort of detailed and obsessive scrutiny, Walmart's leaders concluded that they themselves could handle most external operations better, cheaper and faster. It was this early realization that led the company to develop its multilayered distribution system and to identify logistics — the branch of management concerned with moving supplies from point to point, and which relies upon information to enhance speed, efficiency and control — as its primary expertise. The field of logistics, of course, is rooted in the military; historian James Huston describes logistics as "the application of time and space factors to war.” [6] Unsurprisingly, there is a martial fervor to the company’s campaign to achieve total coordination of its worldwide operations.

Premiere of Walmart Television at 07:30 on January 11, 1988.

Walmart has built its empire by deploying a selection of pre-designed, proprietary building types and adapting these to local requirements. Individually these big boxes, surrounded by acres of parking and suburban commercial landscaping, have limited impact; but their cumulative effect — multiplied across almost 4,300 U.S. Walmart stores — is considerable indeed. According to a study by Matthew Zook and Mark Graham, geographers at the University of Kentucky, "Fully 60 percent of the entire U.S. population lives within 5 miles of a Wal-Mart location and 96 percent are within 20 miles." [3] What is more, Walmart has nearly saturated its rural and suburban markets and is now focusing on cities. Yet so far the retailer has struggled to successfully build in urban areas. [4]Herein lies an opportunity to investigate the design possibilities latent not only in Walmart’s building types but also in the organizational practices — especially its unparalleled expertise in logistics — that have made the company ubiquitous in the American commercial landscape. [5] What might the field of architecture learn from Walmart? What new research avenues, urban forms, building types and spatial conditions might emerge?

Total area of Manhattan compared to total floor area of Walmart stores in the U.S. Click Image to Enlarge.

Sam Walton’s ledger, Walmart Visitors' Center, Bentonville, Arkansas. [Images courtesy of the author except where noted.] Walmart Stores, Inc. is a discount retailer based in Bentonville, Arkansas.In 2008 it earned 400 billion dollars and had a combined floor area larger than the island of Manhattan.If Walmart were a country, it would be the world's 26th largest economy, just behind Austria. Walmart is also the largest private employer in the United States, with a workforce of over 1.4 million, second only to the federal government. Charles Fishman, in The Walmart Effect, describes the company as "carefully disguised as something ordinary, familiar, even prosaic. But in fact, Walmart is a completely new kind of institution: modern, advanced, potent in ways we’ve never seen before . . . Walmart has outgrown the rules — but no one noticed." [1] Charlie Rose, before introducing Lee Scott, then Walmart’s CEO, as a guest on his talk show, proclaimed Walmart "the most powerful company ever to exist." [2] It is, in fact, the company’s specialization in logistics — borne out through obsessions with efficiency, information and distribution — that has made it the sophisticated corporation Fishman describes. Given that Walmart’s operations are fundamentally concerned with territory, examining them closely yields insight into some of the mechanisms now at work shaping cities.

All Those Numbers: Logistics, Territory and Walmart

Peer Reviewed: Jesse LeCavalier

Forum of Design for the Public Realm

Logistics, Territory and Walmart: All Those Numbers: Places: Design Observer