Walmart

In nineteen sixty two, every major retailer chased big cities. Kmart opened in Detroit. Sears built in Dallas. Sam Walton drove his pickup truck to towns of five thousand people — places the industry had written off as too small to bother with. He opened a discount store in Rogers, Arkansas. Then another twenty miles away. Then another. All within a tight radius of Bentonville. The clustering was the weapon. Five stores surrounding one distribution center meant one truck could restock all of them in a morning. Supplier trucks pulled up to one side of the warehouse. Store trucks pulled up to the other. Products moved across the dock without ever sitting on a shelf. No storage. No re-picking. No inventory rotting in a warehouse waiting for someone to need it. Distribution costs fell to two to three percent of sales. The industry average ran four to five percent. That gap sounds small until you multiply it across six hundred billion dollars in annual revenue.