Samuel Moore Walton (March 29, 1918 – April 5, 1992) was an American business magnate best known for founding the retailers Walmart and Sam's Club, which he started in Rogers, Arkansas, and Midwest City, Oklahoma, in 1962 and 1983 respectively.

He worked for his brother's Walton Mortgage Company, which was an agent for Metropolitan Life Insurance,[3][4] where he foreclosed on farms during the Great Depression.

[14] With the help of a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law, Leland Robson, plus $5,000 he had saved from his time in the Army, Walton purchased a Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas.

With the sales volume growing from $80,000 to $225,000 in three years, Walton drew the attention of the landlord, P. K. Holmes, whose family had a history in retail.

[16] Admiring Sam's great success and desiring to reclaim the store and franchise rights for his son, he refused to renew the lease.

[17] With a year left on the lease, but the store effectively sold, Walton, his wife, Helen, and his father-in-law managed to negotiate the purchase of a new location on the downtown square of Bentonville, Arkansas.

Walton negotiated the purchase of a small discount store, and the title to the building, on the condition that he get a 99-year lease to expand into the shop next door.

[18] With the new Bentonville "Five and Dime" opening for business, and 220 miles away, a year left on the lease in Newport, the money-strapped young Walton had to learn to delegate responsibility.

[19][20] After succeeding with two stores at such a distance (and with the postwar baby boom in full effect), Walton became enthusiastic about scouting more locations and opening more Ben Franklin franchises.

(Also, having spent countless hours behind the wheel, and with his close brother James "Bud" Walton having been a pilot in the war, he decided to buy a small second-hand airplane.

Both he and his son John would later become accomplished pilots and log thousands of hours scouting locations and expanding the family business.).

[19] In 1954, he opened a store with his brother Bud in a shopping center in Ruskin Heights, a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri.

)[19] By 1962, along with his brother Bud, he owned 16 stores in Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas (fifteen Ben Franklins and one independent, in Fayetteville).

Included in the effort was a willingness to find American manufacturers who could supply merchandise for the entire Walmart chain at a price low enough to meet the foreign competition.

First, existing competition was limited and secondly, if a store was large enough to control business in a town and its surrounding areas, other merchants would be discouraged from entering the market.

[15] To make his model work, he emphasized logistics, particularly locating stores within a day's drive of Walmart's regional warehouses, and distributed through its own trucking service.

[30] Walton died on Sunday, April 5, 1992 (three months shy of Walmart's thirtieth anniversary), of multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer,[31] in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The others are not directly involved in the company (except through their voting power as shareholders), however his son Jim Walton is chairman of Arvest Bank.

Two daughters of Sam's brother Bud Walton — Ann Kroenke and Nancy Laurie — hold smaller shares in the company.

[36] Walton was honored for his work in retail in March 1992, just one month before his death, when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-President George H. W.

[38] Walmart operates in the United States and in more than fifteen international markets, including: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, South Africa, Botswana, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Kenya, Lesotho, Eswatini (Swaziland), Honduras, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua and the United Kingdom.