In 1982 Wal-Mart was still exclusively a rural retailer, continuing to build scale but only in towns below a certain size. It was not felt they could yet compe

In 1982 Wal-Mart was still exclusively a rural retailer, continuing to build scale but only in towns below a certain size. It was not felt they could yet compete with more well-funded better-established chains. Most stores more closely resembled today's Dollar General than a big box There were not yet "superstores", and most people in big cities had never heard of them. With IBM PC's not yet having a significant impact on business, and almost nobody doing any data networking compared to today, Wal-Mart already had a fully computerized POS/inventory/logistics-management system in every store, integrated into their headquarters in small-town Arkansas in almost real-time, with data-mining informing the financial decision making. No one else had anything close, not Sears, Target, or Kmart, who were obviously going to end up having difficulty when Sam thought the time was right for Wal-Mart to come to the big cities. Even though all these retailers had the same computer hardware in their respective headquarters, IBM's good old "impersonal" mainframes which only big companies could afford. Walton would bus all his managers to Bentonville for a pow-wow every year, scheduled to start at 8 all week. If you got there precisely at 8, you had already missed the most important half-hour with Sam, he would start at 0730. Drove an old pickup truck too, so he could save money.