town in Washington, recently started a World Wide Web page entitled "Us against the Wal." The town's neighborhood association promised that they "will fight them [Wal-Mart] tooth and nail" (PNA/Island Aerie Internet Productions, 1995/1996). The increasing opposition indicates that the road ahead for Wal-Mart may not be as smooth as Wal-Mart's annual report would entail. This requires Wal-Mart to rethink its expansion strategy since it would not be profitable to operate in an unfriendly community. How Big Will Wal-Mart be in Five Years if all continues to go well? -- Before he died, Sam Walton expressed his belief that by the year 2000 Wal-Mart should be able to double the number of stores to about 3,000 and to reach sales of $125 billion annually. Walton predicted that the four biggest sources of growth potential would be the following: 1. Expanding into states where it had no stores; 2. continuing to saturate its current markets with new stores; 3. Perfecting the Super-center format to expand Wal-Mart's retailing reach into the grocery and supermarket arena -- a market with annual sales of about $375 billion; 4. Moving into international markets (Thompson & Strickland, 1995). Wal-Mart Super-centers represent leveraging on customer loyalty and procurement muscle in order to create a new domestic growth vehicle for the company. With few locations left in the U.S. to put a new Sam's Club or traditional Wal-Mart, the Super-center division has emerged as the domestic vehicle for taking Wal-Mart to $100 billion in sales. Before the Super-center, Walton experimented with a massive "Hyper-mart", encompassing more than 230,000 square feet in size. The idea failed. Customers complained that the produce was not fresh or well-presented and that it was difficult to find things in a store so big that inventory clerks had to wear roller skates. One of Walton's philosophies was that traveling on the road to success required failing at times. As a r...
