"Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America"

Nice computer graphic.

Link via my colleague, Richard Warr.

Comments

[The Walmart Conundrum]

It's funny how many people have commented on this chart by saying it looks like the spread of cancer; this analogy is especially appropriate considering the increased rate of new Walmarts as the company grew. You can almost pinpoint the exact instance when it became a terminal, untreatable illness. Stage 4, so to speak.

[Jake]

It shows that the success of Walmart is due to their distribution centers and the software that drives them.

[JorgXMcKie]

Pretty funny, both of you. I might suggest that the growth of Walmart is at least partly due to the desire of shoppers to buy stuff there.

Why do some hate poor people so much?

It would be fun to see a similar graphic of Costco, K-Mart, JC Penney, Sears, etc.

This is interesting to me because I just used the Walmart/Costco example in Michigan to discuss how in somewhat similar environments two profit-seeking organizations chose to view that environment differently and strategize differently. Walmart has over 100 stores in Michigan, including 6 in the UP, and thousands of employees.

Costco has about a dozen stores in Michigan, every one of them in middle to upper-middle class white suburbs. They employ a few hundred. When Sam's Club opened a store in Canton, MI, some 80% of the nearest Costco employees applied for jobs at Sam's.

On a nearest Walmart to Costco comparison, Walmart pays its employees more had a higher % have health benefits. OTOH, Costco is unionized, so some people just luuuuuuuuv them, whether they really benefit poor people or not.