The small-town hustler who beat Kmart, Sears, and everyone else

If It Exists had been around in the 1960s, the cover wouldn’t be Jobs in a black turtleneck or Musk launching rockets. I

t’d be Sam Walton, sunburned, grinning under a trucker cap, flying a beat-up plane over Arkansas backroads just to check on a discount store in a town of 2,000 people.

Before Walmart was a $250 billion family fortune, it was just Sam, a Depression kid who hated wasting twine, once hauled hula hoops in a johnboat tied to his car because he couldn’t afford a truck, and who thought the future of retail wasn’t in cities but the forgotten Main Streets everyone else ignored.

And if Walton had NTE Pro? He’d be circling every idea with thin margins, tearing through “Marketplace Reinventions,” and by Monday you’d see him launching Walnet, the Costco of digital life. Subscriptions, healthcare, tickets, banking and anything bloated with fees, gutted by Sam.

That’s why this edition is another historical version of It Exists. Because Walton isn’t just the discount king. He’s the blueprint for building empires out of ordinary ideas.

Failure as Tuition

Sam’s first big win was also his first big loss. At 27, with $25,000 borrowed from his father-in-law, he bought a Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas. He hustled hard, ice cream machines, popcorn stands, customer service that felt like a carnival. Families mobbed the place.

Then the rookie mistake hit. He hadn’t read the lease closely. No renewal clause. After five years of booming sales, the landlord booted him and took the store.

Most people would’ve folded. Sam clenched his fists, straightened up, and said: “I’m not whipped. I’ll find another town.” That line is the DNA of Walmart. Bentonville came next, with a 99-year lease and a vow never to get tricked again.

👉 Lesson 1: Failure isn’t fatal. It’s tuition if you keep moving.

Incentives Over Speeches

Before Walmart, Sam worked at JC Penney. Three moments rewired his brain.

First: JC Penney himself showed him how to save an inch of wrapping paper and twine. “We only make profit from what we don’t waste,” the old man said. That obsession with efficiency became Sam’s gospel.

Second: his manager waved a profit-sharing check worth $65,000. Sam was making $85 a month. Seeing a manager earn 60 years of his salary in one year flipped a switch. Sam vowed to share the upside with his own store managers. That decision created a generation of lieutenants who ran like owners.

Third: his boss invited the team to Sunday ping-pong at his house, where they ate and talked shop. Sam stole the playbook where managers should live the business, not clock in and out.

👉 Lesson 2: Incentives drive harder than pep talks. Give people skin in the game.

Relentless Curiosity

Sam’s real genius wasn’t invention. It was shameless copying. He crawled competitor floors with a notebook, measuring aisles. He barged into headquarters without appointments, peppered executives with questions, and stole anything worth stealing.

When discounting appeared, Kmart raced to big cities. Sam looked at the scraps, tiny towns everyone ignored and quietly built an empire. He called it “management by walking around.” Every idea was fair game if it worked.

Sometimes that curiosity veered into disaster. He once chased shopping centers instead of discount stores, his “split tens” moment in blackjack. But failure didn’t kill him. He just doubled back to what worked.

👉 Lesson 3: Copy shamelessly. Don’t split tens. Double down on what’s working.

The Showman

Walmart wasn’t just cheap. It was a circus. Sam knew business was theater. At one opening, he stacked trucks of watermelons outside and added donkey rides. Problem: it was 115°. The melons exploded. The donkey pooped everywhere. The chaos spilled into the aisles.

Most founders would panic. Sam laughed and sold more socks. That’s the difference. Folksy charm on the outside, iron fist inside. He drove his top executives mercilessly, some called him “that old slave driver” but he treated frontline workers like gold, riding in trucks with drivers and bringing donuts to the warehouse at 2:30 a.m.

👉 Lesson 4: People don’t just buy products. They buy the circus and the culture behind it.

Betting Big Where It Counts

For all his penny-pinching, Sam wasn’t afraid to swing. In 1979, he dropped half a billion dollars, in 1979 money on IBM mainframes to wire every store and warehouse into a real-time data network. Everyone else thought computers were overhead. Sam saw them as a weapon.

That single bet turned Walmart into a logistics monster decades before “data-driven” became a buzzword.

And he played the long game at home, too. In 1954, on his father-in-law’s advice, he quietly moved most of his stock into trusts for his kids back when it was worth almost nothing. By the 1990s, each child was worth billions, and inheritance taxes couldn’t touch the fortune.

👉 Lesson 5: Be cheap everywhere but bet big on the few things that compound.

Sam Walton If He Was Here Today

Drop Walton into 2025 and he wouldn’t waste time building another Supercenter. He’d look for bloated industries the same way he once looked at overpriced socks in Newport.

• Subscriptions: He’d launch one membership that bundles everything, video, software, storage, music killing subscription fatigue with Walmart-style simplicity.

• Healthcare: He’d do to medicine what he did to Main Street: cut out middlemen, buy direct, and pass savings to customers. Transparent pricing for procedures. Pharmacies that run at cost.

• Finance: Sam would torch hidden fees and fine print. Banking would look like his old stores: open, stripped-down, and brutally competitive on price. No $35 overdraft fees, no 20% credit card traps.

• Ticketing: Forget “convenience fees.” He’d launch the ultimate fan-first marketplace, where artists and fans win, and the middlemen get crushed.

• AI Infrastructure: In the ’70s he bet on mainframes; today he’d bet on AI as a utility. Supply chains that anticipate demand, logistics run by predictive models, personalization that makes every shopper feel like the store is built for them.

And he’d still be flying store to store, except now those “stores” would be digital marketplaces.

Sam Walton wouldn’t be tinkering in Web3 hype or chasing vanity startups. He’d be hunting industries where inefficiency is gospel and margins are fat. He’d sharpen the axe, gut the costs, and scale it nationwide.

👉 What would Sam think needs to exist today? A new era of everyday low prices applied to the systems we all hate.

The Spark

Sam Walton’s legacy isn’t fancy. It’s not a single “Eureka!” invention. It’s the compounding effect of small bets, relentless experiments, and an almost irrational refusal to quit. He proved that discipline and determination could bend the trajectory of not just a company, but an entire family line from hovering at the poverty line in the Depression to building one of the greatest fortunes in history.

That’s the real invention: turning ordinary into extraordinary through action. Walton showed that a simple idea, taken seriously enough, can redraw maps, rewrite industries, and outlive its founder by generations.

That’s why we built NTE Pro to surface the ideas worth chasing. And NTE Zero To One to help you actually build them.

Walmart exists. Generational wealth exists. The only question left is: what will you make exist?

If you want to go deeper, start with Founders Podcast on Sam Walton an unfiltered look at the man behind the empire or read his autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America, the same book Jeff Bezos once handed out to early Amazonians as a roadmap.