Samuel Moore Walton was born on March 29, 1918, in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, the son of a farmer turned farm-loan businessman and his schoolteacher wife. The family moved to Missouri during the Depression, and Walton grew up in Columbia, Missouri, where he graduated from the University of Missouri with an economics degree in 1940. He entered the retail business through a J.C. Penney management trainee program before serving in the Army during World War II, returning to open a Ben Franklin franchise in Newport, Arkansas, in 1945. When his landlord declined to renew his lease in 1950, he moved to Bentonville, Arkansas — the town that would become the headquarters of the largest company in human history.
Walton's insight — that rural American consumers were underserved by existing retail, that they would drive significant distances to access genuine discount prices, and that the volume of sales that resulted could underwrite a cost structure that would make the prices sustainable — was not original as an idea but became significant in its execution. Walmart's first store opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962. The expansion that followed was guided by Walton's ESTJ insistence on operational discipline: the systematic tracking of inventory, the rigorous management of supplier relationships, the investment in technology (Walmart was an early adopter of bar-code scanning and satellite-linked inventory systems) that made the scale manageable.
By 1985, Sam Walton was the richest man in America, a position he held with characteristic discomfort: he drove a 1979 pickup truck, lived in a modest house, and cut his own hair at a local barbershop. His autobiography Made in America (1992) — completed as he was dying of bone marrow cancer — describes a life organized around the ESTJ values of work, community, and the competitive satisfaction of operational excellence. His relationships with employees — called 'associates' — were structured by his conviction that genuinely engaged people performed better than merely compensated ones, and his practice of visiting stores unannounced, knowing the names of stock room employees, and sharing financial data with all associates was creative for corporate America of the 1970s and 1980s.
Walton died on April 5, 1992, having built the largest private employer in the United States and one of the most life-changing business enterprises in economic history. Walmart's legacy is contested: its practices transformed supply chains and consumer prices while also displacing small businesses and, critics argue, driving down wages across the sectors it entered. Walton himself was aware of the disruption his company caused; he believed the value delivered to customers outweighed the cost to competitors. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom one month before his death.
