hing: a large assortment of quality merchandise; low prices; satisfaction guaranteed; friendly service; convenient hours; free parking; a pleasant shopping experience. His motto was, always exceed the customers expectations. In the 1950's and 1960's the great migration from the inner cities and from the rural areas to the suburbs had begun. The big retail giants stayed put, around the large populated suburban and urban areas. Small town and rural America either had to travel to the big city to buy cheaper or buy from the local merchant at higher prices. These merchants seemed to think that since they had a captive audience they could stick with their 35 to 45 percent mark-ups. There seemed to be an ever widening or let me say, vacuum occurring. Walton has been accused of single handedly driving the small town merchants out of business. Reality shows though that the small town merchants brought about their own demise, by being greedy and only trying to monopolize their small piece of the market. They also viewed that their loss of revenue, declining because of people moving out and people driving to the urban areas to shop, could only be solved by raising the mark-up on their goods. Sam saw just the reverse of this. Buy in tremendous volume, mark the goods up less (30%) and carry a large variety of goods. Every day low prices is a hall mark of Wal-Mart and Sam credits a manufacturer's agent from New York, Harry Weiner, with his first real lesson about pricing: "Harry was selling ladies' panties for $2 a dozen. We'd been buying similar panties from Ben Franklin for $2.50 a dozen and selling them at three pair for $1. Well, at Harry's price of $2, we could put them out at four for $1 and make a great promotion for our store. "Here's the simple lesson we learned ... say I bought an item for 80 cents. I found that by pricing it at $1.00, I could sell three times more of it than by pricing it at $1.20. I might make only half the profit per it...
