But Walton, who died on April 5 at the age of 74, was no ordinary working stiff. He lived to compete–whether it was to become Missouri’s youngest Eagle Scout or to surpass K mart and Sears in sales–and fueled his ambitions with an almost comical self-assurance. " It never occurred to me that I might lose," he writes. Winning often meant shoplifting other people’s ides–“most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else.” Winning also required stomping on traditional retail players: manufacturers’ reps and unions.
Such attitudes created a very different kind of company, based on thrift and reward for hard work. “Associates,” as Walton called his employees, were making minimum wage until his wife cried unfair. But instead of raises, he gave them profit-sharing and stock-purchase plans that allowed many to retire hundreds of thousands of dollars richer. His executives drew low salaries, too, but some earned millions in stock options. In exchange, they spent grueling weeks on the road visiting stores, staying in budget hotels and reporting to Walton every Saturday at 7:30 a.m.
Walton’s story is ably assisted, if unstirringly told, by coauthor John Huey, senior editor at Fortune. The memoir provides little new information, and replays Walton’s well-publicized antics: dancing the hula in a grass skirt on Wall Street to pay off a lost bet or holding kiss-the-pig contests for charity. No devotee of introspection, Walton hardly explains what it was like to grow up with parents who hated each other, or his anguish after his temporary retirement in the mid-1970s nearly tore his company apart. Wrestling with the charge that he destroyed Main Street America, Walton gets defensive: if he hadn’t moved in to serve the customer better, someone else would have. Doubleday may have to count on the kindness of Wal-Mart shoppers to recoup the $4.5 million it reportedly advanced for the memoir.
