Sam Walton opening the 2nd Wal-Mart

In 1962 Sam Walton went from Rogers, Arkansas, where he had opened his first Wal-Mart store, to the Ben Franklin Headquarters in Chicago; he went there with an idea, the idea of taking a discount store and putting it in small towns in rural America, thus he asked the high personnel of Ben Franklin's to sell him merchandise at a discount rate so that he and them could together serve the rural communities with discount stores (Wal-Mart's); however, after a morning of discussions, they refused to sell him merchanidse at a discount rate.

Well, undeterred, he continued to pursue his vision, and two years later, in 1964, at age 46, he opened his 2nd Wal-Mart store in Harrison, Arkansas; however, it was anything but a smooth opening. David Glass, president of a drug retail chain explained what he saw the day it opened, "I saw Sam bought a couple of truck-loads of watermelons and he had stacked them across the front of the store, and he had donkey rides for the kids out in the parking lot; but what he didn't anticipate was that the temperature would rise to 110 degrees Farenheit in Harrison that day, and the waterlons began to pop and then watermelon juice began run over the parking lot and the donkeys did what donkeys do, and you can imagine what it looked like. The thing I didn't realize about Sam, though, and the people who were involved in those early days in Wal-Mart is that they had a quality that I haven't seen in many people or in many companies, and that was that there was never a day that went by that they didn't improve something." When Sam died in 1994, the same David Glass, who had been hired by Sam earlier, became President and CEO of Wal-Mart, and the ratail store witnessed its greatest growth.