David Rosenthal: observation

Transcript context

…So much of Walmart is trying something, doing an experiment, watching it fail on some small scale, and choosing not to roll it out, or watching it succeed and then choosing to rapidly roll it out across as many stores as possible. We'll get into this, but in the very first store opening, they put a whole bunch of watermelons outside. It was swelteringly hot, and they started exploding in the parking lot and getting watermelon juice all over all the customers in their cars. That was actually Walmart number two. It was in Harrison. We'll get there, but yes, a legendary story. After high school, he goes on to college locally at the University of Missouri. The only way he can go because his family has no money—it's the Depression—is he attends on an ROTC scholarship. He still has to pay his living expenses, and mom, dad, and the family aren't going to help out. There's no money in the family. He keeps his newspaper route, but he's busy and he actually has political aspirations on campus. He becomes the president of the class. He's greeting everybody. He's in ROTC. He's busy, so he hires a few people under him to actually do the delivery of the newspapers and help scale the business. By the end of college, he's making $4000–$5000 a year from his newspaper activities, which is huge. We're going to get into what his first job pays him in a minute, but $4000–$5000 a year in the '30s during the Depression is a lot of money. Yeah, it's crazy.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.