4 ideas
In 1945 Walton bought a Ben Franklin franchise store in Newport, Arkansas for $25,000, $20,000 of it borrowed from his father-in-law. He grew it into the top store in its six-state region by breaking franchise rules and buying goods direct from cheaper suppliers. In 1950 he lost it anyway because his lease had no renewal clause, and the landlord took the store for his own son.
Walton bought ladies' panties at $2 a dozen and sold them at four for $1 instead of the usual three for $1. Volume rose so much that total profit beat what the higher price would have earned. His claim is that in discount retail, cutting the per-item margin raises unit sales enough to increase absolute profit, so the discounter's task is to find where volume growth outruns margin loss.
Walmart put stores in small towns that national chains ignored, each within a day's truck drive of a company distribution center, and filled in a region before expanding outward. Walton scouted sites from his own small plane. Dense clustering cut logistics costs, and the cheaper logistics funded the low prices that dominated markets too small to support a second big discounter.
Walton constantly walked rival stores, including Kmart, with a notepad and tape recorder. He looked deliberately for what they did better than Walmart, not for what they did badly. Treating every competitor as a free source of tested ideas turns benchmarking into a steady supply of improvements to copy, while hunting for rivals' flaws mostly flatters your own operation.