Sam Walton: Wal-Mart Discounting
No one better personified the vitality of the American Dream in the second half of the 20th century than Sam Walton. A scrappy, sharp-eyed bantam rooster of a boy, he grew up in the Depression dust bowl of Oklahoma and Missouri, where he showed early signs of powerful ambition: Eagle Scout at an improbably young age and quarterback of the football team.
He possessed a gift for anticipating where things were headed, and he probably understood the implications of the social and demographic currents that were sweeping the country - especially outside its cities - better than anyone else in business. That acumen hastened his rise from humble proprietor of a variety store in the little Delta cotton town of Newport, Ark to largest retailer in the world and richest man in America.
山姆·沃尔顿:沃尔玛折扣店
在20世纪下半叶，没有人比山姆·沃尔顿更能代表美国梦的活力了。作为一个斗志旺盛、目光敏锐的矮脚鸡男孩，他在俄克拉荷马州和密苏里州的大萧条尘暴区长大，在那里他表现出了强大抱负的早期迹象:很小的时候就当上了老鹰童子军(Eagle Scout)队员和橄榄球队的四分卫。
他有一种预测未来走向的天赋，而且他可能比商界的任何人都更了解席卷全国——尤其是城市以外——的社会和人口潮流的影响。这种敏锐的嗅觉让他从三角洲棉花小镇纽波特一家杂货铺的小老板一跃成为世界上最大的零售商和美国首富。
Write an essay within 250 words, stating how a supermarket becomes famous.
写一篇250字以内的文章，说明超市是如何出名的。
https://lanfeizi.wixsite.com/english-learning/blog/piggly-wiggly
Walton viewed all these arguments as utter foolishness. He had been a small-town merchant. And he had seen the future. He had chosen to eat rather than be eaten. As it turned out, the consumer voted heavily with Walton. He gave America what it really wanted - low prices every day.
There is no argument offered here that Sam didn't clutter the landscape of the American countryside or that he didn't force a lot of people to change the way they made a living. But he merely hastened such changes. The forces of progress he represented were inevitable. His empowering management techniques were copied by businesses far beyond his own industry; his harnessing of information technology to cut costs quickly…
After that, the first wave of attention focused on Walton as populist retailer: his preference for pickup trucks over limos and for the company of bird dogs over that of investment bankers. His charisma had motivated emplyees to believe in what Wal-Mart could accomplish. It was the American Dream.
Walton began to be calumniated by some, especially beleaguer small-town merchants. They rallied a nostalgic national press, which - from its perch - waxed eloquent on the lost graces of small-town America, blaming that loss squarely on Sam.
在那之后，沃尔顿作为平民主义零售商受到了第一波关注:比起豪华轿车，他更喜欢皮卡;比起投资银行家，他更喜欢鸟狗公司。他的个人魅力激发了员工们对沃尔玛的信心。这就是美国梦。
沃尔顿开始受到一些人的攻击，尤其是被围攻的小镇商人。他们召集了一家怀旧的全国性媒体，这家媒体站在自己的立场上，滔滔不绝地谈论着美国小镇失去的魅力，并将这一损失完全归咎于萨姆。
As the chain began to take off, he made major adjustments to manage the growth - again always seeming to see ahead. He attended an IBM school in upstate New York. His goal: to hire the smartest guy in the class to come down to Ark, and computerize his operations. He realized that he could not grow at the pace he desired without computerizing merchandise controls. Wal-Mart went on to become the icon of just-in-time inventory control and sophisticated logistics - the ultimate user of information as a competitive advantage. Its computer database is second only to the Pentagon's in capacity, and though he is rarely remembered that way, Walton may have been the first true information-age CEO.
随着供应链开始起飞，他做出了重大调整，以管理增长——似乎总是在展望未来。他就读于纽约北部的一所IBM学校。他的目标是:雇佣班上最聪明的人来方舟，把他的操作电脑化。他意识到，如果不把商品控制电脑化，他就无法以自己想要的速度增长。沃尔玛后来成为准时制库存控制和先进物流的象征——作为竞争优势的信息的最终使用者。其计算机数据库的容量仅次于五角大楼，尽管很少有人记得沃尔顿，但他可能是第一位真正意义上的信息时代首席执行官。
Once committed to discounting, Walton began a crusade that lasted the rest of his life: to drive costs out of the merchandising system wherever they lay - in the stores, in the manufacturers' profit margins and with the middleman - all in service of driving prices down, down, down.
Using that formula, which cut his margins to the bone, it was imperative that Wal-Mart grow sales at a relentles space. He would buzz towns in his low-flying airplane studying the lay of the land. When he had triangulated the proper intersection between a few small towns, he would touch down, buy a piece of farmland at that intersection and order up another Wal-Mart store, which his troops could roll out…