thinking small: store within a store

I first began thinking about some of the very real ways that we could improve our teamwork and put more authority in the hands of our people in the stores.

Our most famous technique for doing this is a textbook example of thinking small. We call it Store Within a Store, and it's the simplest idea in the world. Again, in many big retail companies the department head is just an hourly employee going through the motions, somebody who punches a clock, then rips open boxes and stacks whatever's in them onto shelves. But we give our department heads the opportunity to become real merchants at a very early stage of the game. They can have the pride of proprietorship even if they weren't fortunate enough to go to college or be formally trained in business. They only have to want it bad enough, pay close attention, and work very hard at developing merchandising skills. We've had many cases where the experience has fired people up with ambition, and they've goin on to work their way through college and move on up in the company, and I hope we have many more cases like that.

Again, this only works because we decided a long time ago to share so much information about the company with our associates, rather than keep everything secretive. In Store Within a Store we make our department heads the managers of their own businesses, and in some cases these businesses are actually bigger in annual sales than a lot of our first Wal-Mart stores were. We share everything with them: the costs of their goods, the freight costs, the profit margins. We let them see how their store ranks with every other store in the company on a constant, running basis, and we give them incentives to want to win.

 

Sam Walton

Sam Walton, Made in America by Sam Walton & John Huey. Bantam Books. 1992. p. 227