America’s 250th: The titans of trade: How two small startups put an end to the way we shopped

You would not expect history to happen in such unassuming spots, yet that’s the case. There was a huge change in the retail landscape in 1962 in a backwater town in Arkansas, and then again 32 years later in a Washington state garage that was little more than a rental. Out of these two very different settings came Walmart and Amazon. Decades may have separated their origins, but they are kindred spirits in their legacy; with an unyielding drive for innovation and the customer at the center of everything, they have left global retail in a state of permanent revolution.

It all started with a major shift on July 2, 1962. Sam Walton was opening the doors to the first Walmart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas. His competitors were quick to voice their doubts, convinced you could not run a large discount operation outside of a bustling metropolis. But Walton had other ideas. Having cut his teeth at his old shop, Walton’s Five and Dime, he knew how to trim costs to the bone so he could put some of those savings in the pockets of his customers. He once bought floor tiles in bulk because they were a better price, even if the colors did not quite coordinate. With this kind of thinking, he set out to move a lot of merchandise on thin margins and put his naysayers in their place.

Walmart’s answer was Everyday Low Prices. No need for the temporary sales gimmicks of the day; they offered consistent value and won over their patrons in the process. To pull it off, they became masters of the supply chain. By the late ‘80s, a private satellite system and barcode readers were in place to give the corporate office an instant read on inventory nationwide. The American consumer reaped the benefits. Some researchers put the figure at $287 billion in 2006 alone – about $2,500 per household. In making the basics within reach for those on a tight budget, Walmart, in a sense, democratized the high street.

Then came the internet and a new kind of upheaval. Jeff Bezos saw web traffic climbing by 2,300 percent a year, and in 1994, he was ready to make a move. He gave up a lucrative position on Wall Street and motored across the country, working on a business plan from the front seat of his car. From a Bellevue garage where wooden doors made do as desks, he founded Amazon on July 5. Books made the ideal starting point for a virtual store; you can put millions of them online that no physical shelf could hold.

Bezos nearly called the venture Cadabra until his lawyer put him straight, saying it sounded like cadaver. He toyed with Relentless and Browse before settling on Amazon for its connotations of scale. When he went public on July 16, 1995, and made his first sale to a computer scientist, the rest is history. In under two months, the site was shipping to all 50 states and 45 countries.

Amazon was not content to be just another online catalog. They turned the old model of trudging to a store and taking what you can get on its head by putting an endless inventory at your fingertips. They moved into music and film in 1998 and opened the Marketplace to third parties in 2000. But 2005 was the watershed moment with Prime. For a fee, you got free two-day shipping, and suddenly everyone expected it as a given. That “Amazon Effect” has been the undoing of many a mall. And their reach only grew from there, from the Kindle e-reader in 2007 to the Web Services that form the backbone of today’s internet.