Why Former Spy Valerie Plame Thinks Hillary Clinton is A lot Like FDR

[Art_from_Ark]

120. Personally, I think Wal-Mart started going downhill around 1973 or 74, if not earlier

That's around the time when the Number 1 (Rogers, Arkansas) store moved from its original location on Walnut Street between 6th and 8th streets (shared with an IGA supermarket) to the Walnut Plaza Shopping Center (now practically a ghost town) just a stone's throw away on Walnut Street. The original store still had a folksy, mom-and-pop atmosphere about it, but the new store was bigger and less friendly. This move seems to have coincided more or less with Wal-Mart's listing on the New York Stock Exchange-- or at least, with its first dividend (5 cents/share) issued in 1974. Also around that time, their local TV commercials started bragging about how many new stores were opening, which seems to me to have been a way of showing the Wal-Street crowd that the company was "serious" about growing.

And that is what Wal-Street is constantly demanding-- growth, profits and dividends. While Sam was still around, there was still a lot of "frontier" for Wal-Mart to enter, but toward the end of his life, Wal-Mart was reaching saturation in a lot of markets, making it difficult to appease Wal-Street's constant demands for growth, profits, and dividends. When simple growth becomes more and more difficult, then growth (profit) and dividends have to be made in other ways-- including keeping a lid on employee wages, and finding cheaper sources for goods. Sam was already doing that by the late '80s. It wasn't as obvious then, but what we are seeing now was probably inevitable.