Unlike their competitors that have massive, fancy buildings and towers for their corporate headquarters, WalMart has a tiny little old building. The CEO's office is boring, small, unimpressive and has a non-glamorous view of the parking lot. Executives offices are small and the carpets are worn.
Walmart requires its managers to attend meetings on Saturdays at 7:00am. Their executives are all about the early hours and often arrive to work as early as 5:30 and 6:00am. Their bi-annual manager's meeting (managers fly in from all over the country to attend) starts at 7:00am. And when managers and executives travel for business like this, they share a $49 hotel room with each other. They don't believe in spending unnecessarily.
Their computer systems for tracking sales are so advanced that they are second in size and power to only the Pentagon. They track sales and inventory in real time and know exactly what the best selling items are at each store. They also track the weather to stock items appropriately. For example, during hurricanes, pop-tarts sell like crazy. So as soon as they find out there is a hurricane coming, they put in order for more pop-tarts to Kellog.
As for the whole treating people unfairly thing, the CEO has an explanation for that. WalMart employs one million four hundred and fifty thousand employees. He said with that many employees there are bound to be a few exceptions that don't hold up to the WalMart values. I'm not sure if I believe that or not. But I certainly wasn't aware that WalMart was so powerful and so thrifty with their money.
