The 1966 Game: Who’s Sam Walton Now?

The 1966 game has two purposes:

1. The fun purpose  is to find analogies between major figures at the pre-dawn of the Nixon era and people today.
2. The hidden purpose is to show just how long ago 1966 was.

Today’s game piece is a good example of the latter purpose.

Sam Walton.(left)

Sam Walton today is a titanic figure in the history of American business. Wal-Mart bestrides the world of retailing like a colossus, its power and reach infinitely greater than the firm it displaced, Sears.

Walton is also a great story. A humble man, he based his firm on some simple precepts. Low prices, serving the underserved, and bringing rural America into the mainstream.

He’s also dead. Sam Walton left this Earth in 1992, the richest man in America.

Since then, as I noted yesterday, his legacy has been changed. His kids are right-wing nuts. His board is a me-first bunch of greedheads who bleed communities dry, fight wars with their own workers, and spur our record trade deficit. Wal-Mart the company today is the most controversial firm in America, if by controversial you mean a firm with strident defenders and equally-strident detractors. (I don’t know of anyone who really likes Exxon.)

But remember. This is The 1966 Game. So who’s Sam Walton Now?

He could be anyone.

In 1966 Sam Walton was 48 years old. He was practically a nobody. He had a small chain of what were known as 5 and 10 cent stores centered in the Ozarks. It was growing, but the company he had founded a few years before would not go public until 1969, three years later.

There are many lessons to draw from this.

1. It’s possible to grow very, very rich in this country. In 1966 Bill Gates was an 11-year old kid, and Warren Buffett was a little-known stock trader in Omaha.
2. Business institutions are not permanent. In 1966 Sears dominated retailing, alongside Federated Department Stores, Penney’s, and such five-and-dimes as W.T. Grant. Many, many trends we take for granted had not even begun.
3. The interests of business are self-interest, but this may contradict the general needs of business. Would you really like to live today without e-commerce, without discount stores, without big-box retailers or warehouse stores?
4. What makes American business special is the social mobility we find among businesses, the fact that people like Sam Walton can come from nowhere, armed with a big idea, and become legends, while others falter and fail.

It’s the faltering-and-failing bit that today’s Republicans don’t get. It is this, more than anything else, we should fight to protect, not only in the interests of those people on the bottom, but in the interests of the business leadership of tomorrow.