Walmart—still the country’s largest private employer, the world’s largest retailer, and the world’s largest company by revenue—was founded in the 1960s in this small corner of Arkansas by Sam Walton and his brother Bud when they opened their first discount store in my hometown, Rogers, immediately south of Bentonville. Starting in one rural locale and rapidly expanding to others across the Midwest and South, Walmart (then Wal-Mart, its hyphen since lost to the 21st century) grew quickly by tapping into consumer markets other chains had written off. By 1984, the New York Times wrote that Walton was “gyrating awkwardly to a hula” on Wall Street in celebration of record profit margins. Walmart’s workers were “happy and productive” and Walton a “wiry bundle of energy, company boosterism, and general enthusiasm,” a “folksy, down-home businessman who just happened to be one of the richest people in the country.” By the 2000s, Walmart had expanded successfully into grocery, wholesaling, and international markets, cornering not just rural but suburban and even some urban retail markets, dominating supply chains, able to bend manufacturers and even governments to its will. “Is Wal-Mart Too Powerful?” Businessweek asked in a 2003 cover story. “In business, there is big and there is Wal-Mart.”
The Beast of Bentonville, as the press took to calling it, was foundational in ushering in a new era of the globalized economy. It kept prices murderously and profitably low by strong-arming its suppliers into ever-cheaper modes of production. It capitalized on and pushed forward the liberalization of global trade, sourcing goods ever more cheaply from suppliers reliant on exploited labor in China, Mexico, India, and elsewhere around the globe. As retail and service-sector corporations captured the domestic economy, Walmart’s claim to market dominance helped mark the end of the American industrial economy. And its old corporate headquarters were a relic of the cost-cutting era it helped usher into being. The previous iteration of Walmart’s home office was stark, windowless, and fluorescently lit. A former Procter & Gamble executive recalled his Walmart counterpart by comparing the headquarters to a bus station. At the time, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, the company’s executives were proud of their “ostentatiously shabby surroundings,” which gave credibility to its slogan of “Always Low Prices—Always”: everything in service of the customer’s wallet, even if it meant employees working in the dark, dank cave of the unassuming brick building.
Walmart has always been more of a tech and data company than it gets credit for, but with the onslaught of online retail, it’s had to pivot more aggressively, in search both of higher-income customers and of alternatives to Amazon Prime. Also, it was looking for labor. Walmart today employs twenty thousand tech workers—about a third of its corporate workforce. Its ideal white-collar worker is no longer the homegrown son of the rural South who had to choose between the farm, the factory, and the office. Now, it seeks out employees whose other options may be tech companies in the San Franciscos and New Yorks of the world—urban metropoles that outstrip Bentonville in vibes, opportunity, and work environment. As the political and cultural zeitgeist has bent toward firms like Amazon and the tech giants of Silicon Valley, Walmart’s spot on top of the Fortune 500 began to feel unstable. (It’s soon expected to lose its status as the world’s largest retailer to Amazon.) Something new seemed in order as the retailer moved increasingly into ecommerce and the “omnichannel” space. Tech company or retail giant? Walmart is trying to be both.
It’s only a testament to Walmart’s business savvy that the new corporate campus pays homage to the brand of decadent, neoliberal, tech sector-infused capitalism that seemed to have supplanted the era of cheap. Its physical transformation was self-consciously in the model of Silicon Valley and the Pacific Northwest’s corporate campuses: Walmart hired the SWA Group (which counts among its other projects the campuses of Apple, PayPal, Google, and Stanford) to do landscape design, and the architecture firm Gensler (Meta, Airbnb, Salesforce, etc.) as the design architect. The Palo Alto wish-casting is evident.
Like its tech-world models, the new campus is a small city replete with childcare (“Little Squiggles Children Enrichment Center” is now the largest childcare provider in the northwest Arkansas region), a health and fitness center (“Walton Family Whole Health and Fitness,” a 360,000 square foot facility featuring gyms, pickleball courts, meditation spaces, and cryotherapy), and a food hall (“8th and Plate”). It contains seven miles of walking and biking trails, three hundred EV charging stations, and its own rentable bike fleet. Storefronts throughout the campus hold local outdoor retailers, breweries, and barbecue joints. But for all the expense, ambition, and decadence, the Walmart play-city feels like a copy of a Silicon Valley gone by, the company playing catch-up to a tech economy that no longer exists. In his recent book The Technological Republic, Palantir founder Alex Karp writes (notably, in the past tense):
The Sunnyvales, Palo Altos, and Mountain Views of the world were company towns and city-states, walled off from society and offering something that the national project could no longer provide. Technology companies formed internally coherent communities whose corporate campuses attempted to provide for all the wants and needs of daily life.It’s a company city within a company town. Walmart needed something like this bizarro-world place, straight out of HBO’s Silicon Valley title sequence, to solidify its own future in a shifting economic terrain. But its weirdness reveals the anachronisms of the retail giant’s political and economic legacy, and of its future—not quite conservative enough, not quite liberal enough, not quite a tech company, not just a brick-and-mortar retailer, either.
Before it had a corporate campus of its own, Walmart treated Bentonville as an extension of itself, dumping funding into cultural and infrastructural development in this small, once-rural Arkansas town. As Walmart metastasized, so did the city it stubbornly stayed in. In the ’90s, Alice Walton was at the forefront of successful efforts to build a regional airport and highway spur, supported by the Northwest Arkansas Business Council, a nonprofit development organization co-founded by her father Sam—it still exists, and is funded heavily by the Walton Family Foundation. The foundation has also thrown muscle and capital behind things it terms “amenities”: art museums, mountain biking trails, highly rated schools, a thriving local food and shopping scene. Recently, Sam Walton’s grandsons’ capricious holding company, Runway, bestowed the town with a literal propeller-plane runway and “destination airport” at Thaden Field, “a portal to backcountry flying in the Ozarks.” Who would want to leave? Who needs the state, when Walmart provides?
These are the kinds of things you build when you need to lure people away from cities, which has been the motivation for northwest Arkansas’s (or “Oz,” as recent efforts have tried to rebrand it) economic development machine that also includes other local corporate powerhouses like meat giant Tyson Foods and logistics behemoth J. B. Hunt Transportation. It’s part of Walmart’s transparent effort to make the region a desirable place to live not just for its own workforce, but for those of its suppliers too, which it unofficially requires to maintain an office and executive team within the region. As parts of the tech world—SpaceX, Hewlett Packard, Oracle—make lots of noise about moving their headquarters off the coasts, the region’s boosters are making an explicit play for tech workers, and maybe companies too, to move here. In recent years the Northwest Arkansas Council has placed billboards in places like Austin and Seattle that read, “Go South, young tech workers” and “It’s like Austin, but affordable.”
The Walton dynasty presides in the background of Arkansas politics, but the family has largely stayed out of the culture wars, at least in public. The Walton Family Foundation has put millions of dollars into funding climate projects and environmental journalism, with recent grants to NPR and PBS. After much pressure, in 2021, the Foundation issued a statement opposing the Arkansas legislature’s attacks on trans rights; later that year, it established a special “Arkansas LGBTQ+ Advancement Fund” to “improve the quality of life for LGBTQ+ Arkansans.” But the fund made just one round of grants, in 2022, and its promotional webpage was pulled down last year. More recently, the foundation seems to be tacking to the center: It commissioned a cross-partisan study of nonprofits (“The problems our nation faces are too big for any one sector or political party to solve on its own. They require people with a range of beliefs and experiences to come together to find answers”) and is framing its climate work in similar terms (“Support for Clean, Safe, and Secure Water Supplies Transcends Partisan Politics”).
In order to keep up with the Walton’s benevolent stewardship of Bentonville, and its presumed-to-be-liberal workforce, the Walmart of the 2010s had combined its historic commitment to anti-unionism and conservative economics with a more liberal outlook on identity and inclusion, like its corporate peers. Recently, however, spurred on by Trump’s second term, Walmart’s DEI initiatives have hit the chopping block: Pride merchandise has been pulled, and inclusion and diversity have been renamed “belonging,” even as the company tries desperately to convince its employees to make the move to Arkansas.
In today’s AI-addled, Musk-brained, MAGA techno-fascism, the Waltons’ traditional business conservatism-cum-neoliberal identity politics feels distant and outdated, kind of like their campus. Sam Walton was no Elon Musk—there is some truth (along with considerable mythmaking) in the cheapskate image Walton carefully cultivated by driving an old red Ford F-150 and living in a small ranch house. His children and grandchildren have steadfastly donated to Republicans, but not to Donald Trump. Alice Walton, one of the richest women in the world, supported Nikki Haley’s presidential run and Andrew Cuomo’s independent campaign for New York mayor, and Jim and Rob, two of Sam’s sons, gave millions of dollars to a PAC aimed at unseating members of the radically right-wing House Freedom Caucus. The Waltons were thought to be partially behind former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson’s short-lived bid for president (his announcement came at the Benton County Courthouse, just across the square from the Walmart Heritage Museum housed in the old Walton 5-and-10). In a political culture moving far, far away from what the Waltons might call “common-sense conservatism,” these are increasingly quixotic ways to spend money. These big expenditures show the family’s—if not the company’s—continued fealty to free trade and “free markets” which have long undergirded their global supply chain.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s approach to international trade has taken straight aim at these economic interests through its protectionism—or, at least, heavy-handed and chaotic attempts at it. Walmart was one of the earliest retailers to take at-scale advantage of China’s cheap labor market; a 2004 Frontline special called the Walmart-China relationship “a joint venture,” and the company’s global purchasing office has been in Shenzhen since 2002. Manufacturers told a sociologist in the 2000s that Walmart was both critical to their business and was the least profitable company to contract with: “Every year . . . the Walmart price gets lower and lower, to the point where some suppliers are pushed to the point of bankruptcy.” In 2007, Walmart worked with the University of Arkansas’s Walton College of Business to create a part-time executive MBA in Shanghai specifically for Chinese businessmen working in the company. And China has remained critical to Walmart’s drive to keep prices low and profit margins high, comprising around 60 percent of Walmart’s imports. Tariffs levied against Chinese imports—and many other countries, like India and Bangladesh, that make up Walmart’s import connections—have stayed above 20 percent even as China and the US have reportedly come to a truce in the trade war.
As Trump’s trade war dawdles along, the cracks between business conservatism and Trump conservatism have been showing in earnest. CEO Doug McMillon, who will retire at the end of this month, sat down with Trump at Mar-a-Lago before his inauguration and reportedly told him, “We’re here long term. We’re a large employer. We serve a lot of people. We want the country to thrive. How can we be helpful?” Just a few months later, he was at an Oval Office meeting in April where, alongside the heads of Home Depot and Target, he tried to impress upon the chief executive that broad-based tariffs would mean an uptick in prices. A Walmart spokesperson called the meeting “productive.” But nothing changed; a few weeks after this meeting, at the company’s first-quarter earnings call, Walmart told investors that its prices would soon start to rise. “The magnitude and speed at which these prices are coming to us is somewhat unprecedented in history,” its chief financial officer told the Wall Street Journal. Trump reacted quickly (and characteristically) on Truth Social:
“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”In the months since then, Walmart’s prices have been rising, some slightly and some by more than 50 percent; still, the company claims that the trade war has not affected prices. “Costs increase each week,” McMillon said, but also that the company has been “keeping our prices as low as we can for as long as we can,” crediting a recent increase in high-income shoppers for keeping sales high. It’s no stretch to imagine overseas suppliers are taking the brunt of this trade showmanship.
American companies eating tariffs imposed by a Republican president, a conservative chain up against a conservative president; this can’t have been the future Sam Walton envisioned, nor can it have been what his offspring or his corporate successors thought was coming when they dumped millions of dollars into their new corporate playground.
The world the Walmart campus was built to accommodate is slipping away. As the new HQ fills with workers pedaling to any number of its fully windowed buildings, soaking up the sun in its outdoor spaces, playing pickleball in its associate-use courts, these same workers are no longer a fought-over commodity. To an industry enhanced with layoffs and firings, they’re a dime a dozen. Even if the AI bubble collapses in spectacular fashion, it will have transformed the tech and e-commerce sector. Palantir, Meta, Google, Amazon are falling in line with the Trump circus, having determined that their owners’ interests (and government contracts) are better served by playing nice with the administration than by pissing it off. In a way, Walmart seems adrift, a Spark flag waving in the wind, once at the forefront of changes in global capitalism and now something of a dinosaur figuring out how to respond, economically and politically, to them.
In other ways, though, Walmart reigns on top of its game—a different game than in years past. Its pivots to e-commerce and to attracting higher-income shoppers have been successful. It remains on top of the Global Fortune 500, the top retailer in the world. In the last fiscal year, its revenues grew to $681 billion. As its new CEO takes over, with its competitors headed off towards anarcho-capitalist dreamworld, what will Walmart and its founding family hold on to, and what will they let go?
by Olivia Paschal, N+1 | Read more:
Image: uncredited
