Wal-Mart
rating: 0+x

Basic Information

Walmart (branded as Wal-mart prior to 2008) is a multi-national high volume general retail corporation founded in 1962 by Sam Walton, whose family still own a controlling share in the business.

Normal goods of trade include food and miscellaneous groceries, clothing and footwear and other typical supermarket goods. Depending on the jurisdiction in which they are found, a range of other goods will be on sale, ranging from automotive supplies to outdoor goods and firearms1. In many cases, the range of non-food goods available will be wider than the average for supermarkets in that region.

The Walmart business model is centre around low margin, high turnover sales, keeping overhead as low as possible and using volume and low price to win market share. This is a fairly normal model for a general retailer, but Walmart has been particularly sucessful and as a result has attracted criticism - variously fair, unfair or downright spurious - from the usual variety of sources. Despite this the company continues to operate in a variety of locations worldwide and appears to remain a sucessful and profitably business with a substantial customer base.

See Also

Sources

Bibliography

Game and Story Use

  • For the classic "American Supermarket that even sells guns" Walmart is iconic. Both for the start of your RPG campaign (it's like actually having a set of the equipment tables from the game rules built up in 3D … only with more food) and generally for more oppressed peoples (like the British) to come and gawp at2.
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License