She never found out exactly what happened—an argument with someone whose family Tammy had known since he was four or five. “Brian was such a good guy,” she said, “but I don’t know what affiliations he had. I didn’t know anything wrong or bad about him. He had the biggest heart that I’ve ever found in a guy, and my kids loved him.” A friend told Tammy that her younger daughter, who was seven, needed to go see a counselor, but Tammy shrugged it off—“She’s okay”—because that was how Tammy had made it through three decades of life, telling herself, “It’s okay, it’s all right, I’ll rebound.” Ten years later, Tammy went away on a church retreat, and when she returned she was livid to find that her daughter had gotten a tattoo. But she softened when she saw that it was the years of Brian’s birth and death and his initials. That’s when she understood: her daughter had never grieved for the only man she called Dad.
In the year after Brian got killed, Tammy started going to Mill Creek Park three days a week, sometimes every day, after taking the kids to school if she was working afternoon turn, or when she got off work if she was doing day turn. She would walk the trails and sit by the old wooden flour mill along the river, with the sound of a waterfall rushing over the dam, and be alone with God, and think and rejuvenate.
The blight was spreading, gathering speed, and it followed Tammy after she moved. What had crept through the east side over a decade or two took just a few years on the south side. Tammy’s neighborhood got really bad—a gang called the Dale Boys, because they lived on Avondale and Auburndale, took over. In 1997 she moved with the kids to a house right next door to Brian’s mom, but she couldn’t sell the house they had left—it turned out to have a lot of things wrong—and she ended up cutting a deal with the bank, giving the house back in exchange for having the mortgage written off.
She considered getting out of Youngstown. Crime was terrible just about everywhere, and there was no opportunity beyond the job she had. Most of the people who had something going on were leaving or had left. The whole city was on a downward slide. But within a couple of years she would have her ten years in at Packard, which meant full pay and benefits, including her pension when she retired. She was thankful to have a good job, and Youngstown was affordable. Over time, she started a side business on her closed-in porch, helping people plan weddings, designing invitations and printing them on her laser printer, then she got into Valentine’s Day baskets, graduation cards, even funeral programs. She called her business “A Perfect Cup of T.” One night she and her younger daughter sat in front of a movie and hand-tied 350 bows and glued 350 pearls onto the bows for bridal bookmarks. And she sold Avon at the factory—you could make a lot of money in a plant full of women. She wasn’t going anywhere.
It was harder to get to Packard from the south side than the east, and Tammy was constantly juggling babysitters and after-school programs and work schedules. She used her vacation days to see her older daughter’s performances and her son’s football games. On weekends she kept her kids entertained without spending much money, going for country drives to pick strawberries and apples. She made them go to church on Sunday and Bible study after school. If she couldn’t get to the parent-teacher conference, she talked to the teacher in the morning before class, and once cell phones came along, the teachers always had her number so they could reach her at the factory. She didn’t work overtime until the kids were older. They would congregate with their friends at her house because she wanted to know who their friends were and what they were doing. The girls were not allowed to wear makeup until they were sixteen, and when her son was thirteen and came back from a visit to his father’s with his ear pierced, Tammy made him take it out because she had told him no piercing until high school, and by then he no longer wanted it. Even as high school seniors they were never out later than midnight, or 1:00 a.m. on special occasions. She didn’t abuse them, she bent sometimes, but they needed discipline and Tammy didn’t play. It was crazy out there. And her daughters did not get pregnant, her son stayed out of the gangs, they all graduated from high school and went on to college. God blessed her with three good kids.
Once, someone she knew expressed amazement that she raised three children in Youngstown and they were all doing okay. Tammy got what the person was saying, but she had only done what she was supposed to do. “I had no choice, because my kids were going to have it better than I did. They were going to have it better than my brothers. I did what I needed to do, and that is what my great-grandmother did.”
MR. SAM: SAM WALTON
Sam was born in 1918 in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, right in the middle of the country. He grew up in a pretty hardscrabble time. After the Depression hit, his father, Thomas Walton, got a job repossessing farms around Missouri on behalf of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Sam sometimes traveled with his dad and saw how he tried to leave a little dignity to the farmers who had defaulted on their loans and were about to lose their land. No question, that was where Sam got his cautious attitude toward money. He was just plain cheap. It was the way he was brought up. Even after he became the richest man in America—and he hated it when Forbes put that spotlight on him in 1985, the attention caused his family a lot of extra trouble—he’d still stop to pick up a nickel off the ground. He never liked showy lifestyles. Honesty, neighborliness, hard work, and thrift—those were the bedrock values. Everyone put on their trousers one leg at a time.
“Money never has meant that much to me,” he wrote near the end of his life. “If we had enough groceries, and a nice place to live, plenty of room to keep and feed my bird dogs, a place to hunt, a place to play tennis, and the means to get the kids good educations—that’s rich. No question about it.”
His father was never much of a success, but his mother had ambitions for their two boys, and the couple quarreled all the time. Maybe that was why Sam always needed to stay busy. He was a joiner and a competitor—Eagle Scout, quarterback and student body president at Hickman High in Columbia, Beta Theta Pi at the University of Missouri. He learned to speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they spoke to him. He was small and wiry with a face like a good-natured bird of prey, and he always wanted to win.
Sam found out pretty young that he could sell things. He worked his way through high school and college delivering newspapers, and he won a contest selling subscriptions door-to-door. After college he went to work at a J. C. Penney store in Des Moines for seventy-five dollars a week. That was his first job in retail, and it lasted long enough for Sam to learn that if employees were called “associates,” they gained a sense of pride in the company. Then came the war. He spent three years in the army, stateside because of a heart irregularity. When he got out, he was determined to get back into retail, this time for himself.
Sam wanted to buy a Federated department store franchise in St. Louis, but his new wife, a wealthy Oklahoma lawyer’s daughter named Helen, refused to live in a town with more than ten thousand people. So they ended up in Newport, Arkansas, population five thousand, where Sam bought a Ben Franklin variety store with help from his father-in-law. There was another store right across the street, and he would wander over and spend hours studying how the competition did things. That turned into a lifelong habit. It was in Newport that Sam got to thinking in ways that became the foundation of his success.
He was buying ladies’ satin panties from the Ben Franklin supplier at $2.50 for a dozen, and selling them at three pairs for a dollar. But when he found a manufacturer’s agent in New York who would sell him a dozen for two dollars, he put them out at four pairs for a dollar and had a great promotion. His profit per panty dropped by a third, but he sold three times as many. Buy low, sell cheap, high volume, fast turn. That became Sam’s whole philosophy, and in five years he tripled his sales, making his the number one Ben Franklin in the six-state region.
People were cheap. They’d never pass up a rock-bottom price. It was true in the little all-white towns around Arkansas and Oklahoma and Missouri after the war. It was true everywhe
re all the time.
It was true in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Sam and Helen moved with their four kids in 1950 after a clever landlord took away the store in Newport. Sam opened Walton’s 5&10 on the main square in Bentonville, population three thousand, and it did so well that over the next decade he and his brother Bud opened another fifteen stores. They were in the tiny backwaters that Kmart and Sears didn’t bother with—Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and Coffeyville, Kansas, and St. Robert, Missouri. People were cheap, but there was higher volume in those places than the smart money in Chicago and New York knew. Sam spotted the locations in his two-seater Air Coupe, flying low over a town, scouting the roads and building patterns, then finding the right piece of empty land.
In the grip of his retail fever dream, he left his family on vacations to go check out stores in the area where they were staying. He scoured the competition and hired away their best men with offers of an investment stake in his franchises. He thought up stunts to bring in business and mislead his competitors into thinking he was a cornball. He squeezed every penny out of his suppliers. He never stopped working. He had to keep growing and growing. Nothing could get in his way.
On July 2, 1962, Sam opened his first independent discount store, in Rogers, Arkansas. Huge discounters, selling everything from name brand clothes to auto parts, were the wave of the future. He would ride it or be swept away. He was so cheap that he kept the sign to as few letters as possible: the new store was called “Wal-Mart.” It promised “everyday low prices.”
By 1969 he had 32 stores in four states. The next year, Sam took the company public. The Walton family owned 69 percent of the shares, and Sam was worth around $15 million. Entrepreneurship, free enterprise, risk—the only ways to improve other people’s quality of life.
Throughout the 1970s, Wal-Mart doubled its sales every two years. By 1973 there were 55 stores in five states. By 1976 there were 125 stores, with sales of $340 million. Wal-Mart was spreading outward through the forgotten towns of middle America in a great circle whose center was Bentonville, laying waste to local hardware stores and pharmacies, saturating the regions it conquered so that no one else could compete, each new Wal-Mart built cookie-cutter fashion within a day’s drive of company headquarters, where the distribution center was located. The stores were as big as airplane hangars, no windows, with giant parking lots paved over fields and trees, situated away from the center of town to attract sprawl. Sophisticated computers kept minute-by-minute track of every item of stock that was ordered, shipped, and sold.
By 1980 there were 276 stores, and sales passed $1 billion. Throughout the eighties Wal-Mart grew explosively, to all corners of the country and then overseas. Sam even built stores in big cities like Dallas and Houston, where there was more stealing and it was harder to come up with people of the right moral character who were willing to work there. Hillary Clinton became the first woman to join Wal-Mart’s board. Her husband—the governor—and other politicians came to Bentonville to pay homage. In the middle of the decade, Sam officially became the richest man in America, worth $2.8 billion. He was as cheap as ever—he still got a five-dollar haircut in downtown Bentonville and didn’t leave a tip. He and his company gave almost nothing to charity. But every year each Wal-Mart store would hand out a thousand-dollar college scholarship to a local high school senior, and somehow that bought better publicity than generous corporate philanthropy.
Sam still flew around in a twin-engine plane and visited hundreds of stores a year. He would lead the crowd of assembled associates in a boisterous chant (the idea had come to him on a trip to South Korea in the seventies):
“Give me a W!”
“W!”
“Give me an A!”
“Give me an L!”
“Give me a squiggly!” (Everyone including Sam performed a little twist.)
“Give me an M!”
“Give me an A!”
“Give me an R!”
“Give me a T!”
“What’s that spell?”
“WAL-MART!”
“Who’s number one?”
“The customer!”
Sam always showed up with his first name on a plastic tag, just like all his store clerks. He made a point of collecting suggestions, listening to complaints, and promising to act on them, and hourly workers felt more attended to by this friendly man than they ever did by their managers. The associates were given moral instruction and needed permission from the district manager to date one another. They would hold up their hands and repeat a pledge: “From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every customer that comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look them in the eye, and greet them, so help me Sam.”
The boss became Mr. Sam, the object of a folksy personality cult. Annual meetings drew thousands of people to Arkansas and were staged as pep rallies, lit with evangelical fervor. From his spartan office in Bentonville, the chairman wrote a monthly letter that went out to his tens of thousands of employees, thanking and exhorting them. After he was diagnosed with leukemia in 1982, he assured them, “I’ll be coming around—maybe more infrequently—but I’ll be trying and wanting to see you. You know how much I love to visit with you all on how you’re doing.”
When a town in Louisiana tried to keep Wal-Mart out, fearing that it would leave the main street deserted, the story stayed local. When reports surfaced that Wal-Mart workers were so badly paid, in part-time jobs without benefits, that they often depended on public assistance, Mr. Sam would talk about the hourly associate who retired with two hundred thousand dollars in her stock ownership plan, and he would claim that he was raising standards of living by lowering the cost of living. When clerks and truck drivers tried to join unions and Wal-Mart ruthlessly crushed them, firing anyone foolish enough to speak out, Mr. Sam would come around afterward and apologize to any associates who felt ill-treated, vowing to do better, and some of them said that if only Mr. Sam knew what was going on, things wouldn’t be so bad. When the departure of factory jobs for overseas turned into a flood, Mr. Sam launched a Buy American campaign, winning praise from politicians and newspapers around the country, and Wal-Mart stores put up MADE IN THE U.S.A. signs over racks of clothing imported from Bangladesh, and consumers didn’t stop to consider that Wal-Mart was driving American manufacturers overseas or out of business by demanding killingly low prices.
The face like a good-natured bird of prey under a blue-and-white Wal-Mart baseball cap smiled more as it aged. As long as Mr. Sam was alive, Wal-Mart was a great American story out of Bentonville.
In 1989 the cancer came back in his bones, incurable multiple myeloma. Mr. Sam tried not to slow down. At the next annual meeting, he predicted more than $100 billion in sales by the millennium. “Can we do it?” he shouted to nine thousand people in an arena at the University of Arkansas, and they shouted back, “Yes we can!” He wrote his memoirs, asking himself whether he should have spent more time with his family in his later years, or devoted himself to good works, and concluded that he would do the same exact things all over again. Partnerships had kept the money in the family, and Helen and the four children (they had all received your everyday heartland upbringing) were worth $23 billion, and eventually six of the surviving Waltons would have as much money as the bottom 30 percent of Americans.
By early 1992, Mr. Sam was fading. In March, President and Mrs. Bush came to Bentonville, and Mr. Sam rose unsteadily from his wheelchair to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his final days, nothing cheered him more than a hospital visit from a local store manager who wanted to talk about sales figures. In April, just after turning seventy-four, Mr. Sam died.
And it was only after his death, after Wal-Mart’s downhome founder was no longer its public face, that the country began to understand what his company had done. Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs, and more part-time jobs as store greeters. The small
towns where Mr. Sam had seen his opportunity were getting poorer, which meant that consumers there depended more and more on everyday low prices, and made every last purchase at Wal-Mart, and maybe had to work there, too. The hollowing out of the heartland was good for the company’s bottom line. And in parts of the country that were getting richer, on the coasts and in some big cities, many consumers regarded Wal-Mart and its vast aisles full of crappy, if not dangerous, Chinese-made goods with horror, and instead purchased their shoes and meat in expensive boutiques as if overpaying might inoculate them against the spread of cheapness, while stores like Macy’s, the bastions of a former middle-class economy, faded out, and America began to look once more like the country Mr. Sam had grown up in.
1994
WITH NEW YEAR COMES NEW FREE-TRADE ZONE, NEW UNCERTAINTIES … “I don’t feel threatened,” says the 35-year-old weaver, who has worked at Cone Mills, the world’s largest producer of denim fabric, since she was 18. “It will be good for textiles. It will help save the future of our jobs.” … MTV’S “REAL WORLD” HOUSEMATE GRAVELY ILL … Fuck the world, fuck my moms and my girl / My life is played out like a Jheri curl / I’m ready to die … KURT COBAIN, 1967–1994 In Seattle, a Mood of Teen Dispirit … a result of heightened concerns among parents. “Increasingly,” Lieberman said, “you hear from constituents who say, ‘We’re worried about values, we’re worried about moral decline in our society.’” … Alison Quigg, 14, for one, spent $500 on her orange sags and huge T-shirts. “We see these clothes on MTV,” she says. “I thought they looked good.” … If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility.… AS CITIES REACH RECORD NUMBERS OF KILLINGS, YOUTHS PLAY GRIM ROLE … SHAMEFUL DAWDLING ON RWANDA … Television viewers nationwide watched last night as a white Ford Bronco carrying O. J. Simpson was chased across the freeways of … While the Democratic leaders in Congress are struggling to write health legislation that follows President Clinton’s principles, Newt Gingrich, the Republican whip, has united his party … Call toll free. Know the facts. If we let the government choose, we lose.… OPRAH OVERCOMES She Lost 67 Pounds, Then Gained 90. Now, After a Five-Year War with Her Weight, She Is Once Again Queen of Lean … A HISTORIC REPUBLICAN TRIUMPH … The freshman class, which included not a single “femi-Nazi,” one of Mr. Limbaugh’s favorite epithets for supporters of women’s rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for … I switched my motto—instead of sayin fuck tomorrow / That buck that bought a bottle could’ve struck the lotto
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