Business
Sam Walton's Data Habit: Lessons for Service Businesses
Sam Walton read store sales figures from his hospital bed. The habit behind that began on lunch breaks in Des Moines, and it holds a lesson for growing service firms in 2026.
Days before he died in 1992, Sam Walton was going through store-level sales figures from his hospital bed, according to his oldest son, as recounted in Charles Fishman's book The Wal-Mart Effect. He was 74, and the company he founded was on its way to becoming the largest in the world by revenue. The habit on display in that hospital room was close to fifty years old. It began with a young trainee walking through rival department stores on his lunch break, and it carried him through a franchise store, a lost lease and an early bet on discounting.
