Walmart is one of the world’s largest retailers, with 10,623 stores worldwide. In the United States alone, Walmart has 4,615 stores, and 90% of the country’s population lives within 15 miles of a Walmart store. However, Walmart is not just limited to physical stores. Its online store is also booming, with walmart.com attracting 338.5 million visitors in March 2024.

During the lockdown, Walmart served millions of households with essentials. It is not a joke, but Walmart generates billions of sales in just one day collectively from all the locations. Walmart Inc. is an American multinational retail company headquartered in Bentonville Arkansas. It was founded in 1962, by Sam Walton and Bud Walton. As of today, in more than 10,000 locations across the world. Walmart has all under one roof categories which include, groceries, drink, food, footwear, clothing decor, furniture, accessories, jewelry, beauty products, movies, books, games, electronics appliances, tools, pharmacy, photo center, hygiene products, musical instruments, toys, sporting goods school and office supplies, gardening tools, and auto center.

One of the more common oversimplifications that you’ll hear in the business strategy canon is that your pricing model must fall into one of two camps- high volumes at low prices or low volumes at high prices. While the reality is much more nuanced than that, the choice remains one that all companies must make if they are to create something sustainable.

Walmart has always been focused on low prices. They will do everything they can to slash their prices as low as possible because that is the value that they aim to provide to their customers. They want to beat the competition by convincing their audience that you won’t find these goods for cheaper than anywhere else. All across their supply chain, they are doing everything they can to keep the costs as low as possible. Behind the simplicity of the brand image, lies a sophisticated logistics network, cutting-edge real-time data analysis, thoughtful HR strategy, planned redundancy, strong supplier negotiation, and a land grab strategy rivaled only by perhaps McDonald’s.

How it all started?

The global behemoth started in a very humble way in Arkansas, back in 1962. Mercurial founder Sam Walton had a dream of what a true customer-focused retail experience could be. He believed that you could offer low prices and a great customer experience in parallel. And he set out to prove it.

That first store got off to a roaring success because it did something different from what everyone else provided. Walton’s dedication to leadership through service meant that the store felt like a family-led operation that genuinely cared for those who came through the doors. At this stage, it wasn’t the product range or scale that kept customers coming through the doors; it was the feeling that you actually mattered. You weren’t just a number. You were a valued client whose business was cherished.

Over the next 5 years, Sam Walton and his family expanded this philosophy to open up a further 23 stores, which generated just over $12 million in revenue. With each new store they planted, they strived to understand the local community and their needs – delivering the sort of retail experience they would appreciate. And it was this focus that allowed them to continue growing without losing their spark. Even as they began to scale, the small-town feel remained, and the Walton DNA was sprinkled across every part of the value chain.

In 1969, the company was officially incorporated as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and just one year later, they were listed as a public company. The vision was to bottle up the magic and take it to a national scale. In a way that had rarely been seen before, the ambition was unbounded. They really did see a future where Walmart stores littered the whole of the USA.

By the time 1980 rolled around, the company crossed the $1 billion sales figure, with contributions from 276 stores across the country. Today’s numbers are huge, but back in 1980, it wasn’t easy to appreciate just how powerful this empire was. The company had revolutionized modern retail, and on the back of significant improvements in mass production and global supply chains, Walmart continued to accelerate in terms of influence and market share. They were quickly becoming the go-to brand for anything and everything.

Every brand that tried to compete with them struggled to match their low prices, wide variety, and family-friendly ideals that made customers feel at home in the stores. Even though the Waltons couldn’t be everywhere, the culture they had nurtured continued to permeate each location, making it a shopping experience that couldn’t be beaten.

In the ‘90s, the company continued to expand, breezing through $100 billion sales in a year and growing its operations into Mexico and other select international locations, most notably China. Thanks to the Walmart super-centers, the company strengthened its brand as the one-stop shop for absolutely everything, providing great value and low costs across everything sold.

Under-payed and overworked employees

Labor problems are not new to Walmart. The United States’ largest retailer has been fighting with employees, labor organizations, and unions since the 1970s. Sam Walton, a strong anti-unionist, instilled a non-union culture into Walmart that continues today.

In fact, the company has run into legal troubles throughout the world as it defends its labor policies. For example, the company has shut down stores that have voted for unions, arguing that the reason for closure was related to finances rather than the union itself. Other labor violations include illegal firings, threats, unpaid overtime, and forced overtime. In short, Walmart isn’t a stranger to an unhappy workforce.

Walmart employees complain of their inability to be hired full-time, a lack of medical benefits, and inconsistent scheduling that makes their lives difficult. Most of the $2.7 billion turnaround program was implemented, but employee hours have been cut, resulting in lower net pay than before.

In addition, Walmart workers are fighting to have their employee discount apply to all food as well as general merchandise. Currently, only fruits and vegetables are subject to 10% employee discounts, and only when the items aren’t on sale. Increasing the discount could cost Walmart almost half a billion dollars more per year, albeit with the added potential of getting more customers.

With 1.3 million U.S. employees—more than the population of Vermont and Wyoming combined—Walmart is by far the nation’s largest private-sector employer. It’s also one of the nation’s most aggressive anti-union companies, with a long history of trying to squelch unionization efforts. Walmart maintains a steady drumbeat of anti-union information at its more than 4,000 U.S. stores, requiring new hires—there are hundreds of thousands each year—to watch a video that derides organized labor. Indeed, Walmart’s anti-union campaign goes back decades: There was “Labor Relations and You at the Wal-Mart Distribution Center,” a 1991 guide aimed at beating back the Teamsters at its warehouses, and then in 1997 came “A Manager’s Toolbox to Remaining Union Free.” The first half of a statement in that toolbox has been repeatedly snickered at for being so egregiously false: “We are not anti-union; we are pro-associate.”

Fifty-seven class action lawsuits filed since 2000 complain that Wal-Mart broke wage and hour laws by forcing workers to work “off the clock,” failing to pay them overtime and denying them meals and rest breaks.The largest class action employment discrimination lawsuit in US history, with a class of over 1.5 million women, claims the company intentionally discriminated against its female workers in promotions, pay, job assignments, and training.Nineteen cases filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charge that Wal-Mart discriminated against disabled workers and job applicants.

In addition to the allegations of unlawful conduct, Walmart workers past and present described to Human Rights Watch their personal frustrations. There is a belief among some workers, based on an internal Wal-Mart document and company practices, that long-term employees, with higher wages and often more significant health problems, are being deliberately forced out to cut costs. Workers, young and old, also told Human Rights Watch of their struggles to make ends meet on Wal-Mart wages and complained that they are unable to afford company-sponsored healthcare on their salaries.

Illegal activities and disrespecting historic sites

In 2005, a former commercial real estate executive at Walmart de Mexico (Walmex) blew the whistle on a massive bribery scheme that fueled the company’s explosive growth in the Central American country by paying officials to speed up permits and ignore laws. Walmart dispatched its own investigators, who found evidence of more than $24 million in suspect payments, approved by Walmex’s top executives but hidden from the Bentonville, Ark., home office. Presented with this evidence, Walmart buried the information, allowing the implicated Walmex general counsel to wrap up the inquiry and exonerate himself and his fellow executives.

First, the alleged bribery in Walmart’s fastest-growing market violates the company’s public commitment to maintaining the highest ethical and moral standards. Second, many of the people allegedly involved in the bribery scheme or cover-up are still with the company: Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmex CEO from 2002 to 2005, and reportedly the driving force behind the rampant bribery, is now Walmart vice chairman; then–CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. is still on Walmart’s board; and current CEO Michael Duke was in charge of all foreign subsidiaries in 2005. Third, although its own investigator informed top Walmart officials that “there is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated,” the company didn’t inform U.S. law enforcement.

Walmart has agreed to pay $282 million to settle a seven-year bribery investigation by the U.S. government concerning certain payments that were made to foreign officials in places like Mexico and China.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said that it had charged the world’s largest retailer by sales with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which makes it unlawful for companies to bribe foreign officials.

In a news release, the SEC said that Walmart allowed third parties in Mexico, China, Brazil and India to make payments to foreign government officials without ensuring that they complied with the FCPA. “Walmart valued international growth and cost-cutting over compliance,”

*An Indian burial site in Nashville, Tenn. was demolished to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter on Charlotte Pike in the late 1990s. The company behind the project was JDN Realty of Atlanta, a developer for Wal-Mart stores since purchased by Developers Diversified Realty Corp. of Ohio. By the time excavations were completed in August 1998, the remains of 154 people including children had been taken from their graves, according to the Alliance for Native American Rights.

* In the mid-’90s, Wal-Mart developer JDN was involved in the relocation of numerous native graves while building a store in Canton, Ga., Wal-Mart Watch reports. The store set up a permanent display of unearthed Indian artifacts next to its layaway counter.

* When an Indian burial ground was discovered during construction of a Wal-Mart Super-center in the northern California community of Anderson, the company proceeded with the project anyway, opening the store in 2007. To make up for the site’s desecration, the store erected a bronze statue of a native Wintu feather dancer that was vandalized before the dedication ceremony.

* In 2004, Wal-Mart opened a store in Mexico within view of the 2,000-year-old pyramids of Teotihuacan despite months of protests by local residents as well as prominent Mexican artists and intellectuals. In an interview with the Associated Press, novelist and poet Homero Aridjis compared the store’s opening to “nailing globalization’s stake in the heart of old Mexico.”

Walmart helped fuel the opioid crisis

The Justice Department sued Walmart, accusing it of fueling the nation’s opioid crisis by pressuring its pharmacies to fill even potentially suspicious prescriptions for the powerful painkillers. The civil complaint filed points to the role Walmart’s pharmacies may have played in the crisis by filling opioid prescriptions and by unlawfully distributing controlled substances to the pharmacies during the height of the opioid crisis. Walmart operates more than 5,000 pharmacies in its stores around the country.

The Justice Department alleges Walmart violated federal law by selling thousands of prescriptions for controlled substances that its pharmacists “knew were invalid,” Federal law required Walmart to spot suspicious orders for controlled substances and report those to the Drug Enforcement Administration, but prosecutors charge the company didn’t do that. Walmart knew that its distribution centers were using an inadequate system for detecting and reporting suspicious orders, As a result of this inadequate system, for years Walmart reported virtually no suspicious orders at all. In other words, Walmart’s pharmacies ordered opioids in a way that went essentially unmonitored and unregulated.

Walmart has reached a settlement in litigation relating to the national opioid epidemic totaling $3.1 billion. The settlement will effectively resolve all opioid lawsuits by state, local and tribal governments, according to the retailer.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that 70,630 people died from drug overdoses in 2019 alone, with an estimated 10.1 million people misusing prescription opioids in 2019. The federal agency reports that between 1999 and 2013, the rate of drug poisoning deaths involving opioid analgesics nearly quadrupled, and deaths related to heroin have also increased sharply since 2010, with a 39% increase between 2012 and 2013.

“In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to opioid pain relievers, and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates,” noted HHS. “Increased prescription of opioid medications led to widespread misuse of both prescription and non-prescription opioids before it became clear that these medications could indeed be highly addictive.”

Prior to the settlement, Walmart had vowed to fight the litigation saying its pharmacists were not to blame for the U.S. opioid crisis. Even after the settlement, Walmart said it disputes the allegations, and the settlement framework does not include any admission of liability. Walmart said it will continue to defend the company against any lawsuit not resolved through this settlement framework.

Walmart has adopted many approaches to fighting the opioid crisis, including educating and empowering pharmacies, reducing the number of opioids dispensed, protecting against diversion and theft, educating patients and communities on opioid abuse and advocating for state and national policies aimed at curbing opioid abuse and misuse.