Walmart summary

Have you ever visited a Walmart store? You can’t help but be astounded by the enormity of the store itself, the endless aisles of goods. A typical Walmart Supercenter carries around 100,000 products in a 54,000 square-foot space. In other words, Walmart’s assortment of retail goods is without peer.

This is especially astonishing if you consider that Walmart first got its start in mostly rural areas of the United States. The company opened its first store in the small town of Rogers, Arkansaw.

Another factor that makes Walmart successful is its approach in working with suppliers.

Unlike many other retailers, Walmart doesn’t work with middlemen. This policy came at the urging of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who disdained distributors.

Walmart’s eventual logistics mastery started with a simple problem. Since its first stores were located in rural, isolated areas in the southern United States, many distributors found it unprofitable to deliver goods to Walmart stores.

But Walmart made a virtue out of necessity: If no one wanted to deliver to its stores, the company would do it instead, setting up its own distribution centers, complete with a fleet of trucks.

Walmart’s focus on technological innovation has put it ahead of the competition, as it has made the retailer much more efficient, therefore enabling better service and lowering prices.

The company’s technology tracks every single item in its stores. And when shelves run empty, a computer automatically alerts a warehouse that an order needs to be placed and shipped.

Walmart may be the biggest retailer in the world, but the company is still far from reaching its full potential.

There are still two large categories of potential customers to which Walmart hasn’t successfully reached out: residents in U.S. cities and international shoppers.

How to reach out to new customers isn’t Walmart’s only challenge. A more serious challenge already looms: analysts expect Amazon to overtake Walmart as the world’s biggest retailer by 2024.

There are two reasons why this is a possibility. First, Walmart has criminally neglected e-commerce. And second, Amazon is beating Walmart at its own game when it comes to price and assortment.