There's nothing that comes close to the Walmart Shareholders Meeting, a 14,000-person celebration of all things Walmart held ahead of every summer.
Sure, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger throw down every year with more than twice as many people at the annual Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting, but that event doesn't come close to matching the energy at Walmart's, and Buffett didn't invite pop stars Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton to host this year's meeting, as Walmart did on Friday.
And though the Walmart Shareholders Meeting is always held on a Friday, it is a much bigger party for the employees, who arrive on Tuesday, for four days of events.
But before Walmart was the world's biggest retailer, it was an Arkansas company struggling to earn respect on Wall Street and compete in an industry dominated by Kmart.
When founder Sam Walton held his first shareholders meeting in 1970 (when its stock was trading around $15), he presided over five other people at a coffee shop table. With the help of Walmart's lead historian Alan Dranow and Walton's posthumously published memoir from 1992, "Sam Walton: Made In America," we took a look at how the Walmart Shareholders Meeting went from that to the spectacle it is today.
SEE ALSO: Here's what it's like to attend Walmart's 14,000-person shareholders meeting, a 3-day extravaganza
After that initial coffee shop meeting in 1970, Walton's financial consultant Mike Smith convinced him he needed to throw an actual event.
The first attempt was an utter failure — exactly zero people showed up for the 1971 meeting, held in a motel in Little Rock. Walton and Smith decided they should invite analysts and major shareholders to Walmart's home turf of Bentonville to show them how Walmart did business, and pay for their flights and accommodations.
It worked, but the meetings throughout the '70s were still low key, and several were held in the Bentonville High School auditorium.
For the third year of being a public company, Walton decided to start holding picnics following the meetings.
Walton wrote in his book that it took some time for New York financiers to get used to Walmart's heartland approach to doing things. "I remember one lady wore a formal gown to one of the dinners," he wrote. "It got quite a few curious looks."
Employees — or associates, as they're known at Walmart — took on an increasingly important role at the meetings in the '80s.
Walton grew up in Oklahoma and raised his family in Arkansas, and they were all fans of the outdoors. He held his first 'float trip' on canoes with analysts in 1976.
One year the float trip was followed with some camping.
"The wildest event I remember was when we all went camping overnight in tents on the banks of Sugar Creek," Walton wrote. "That was a real fiasco. Remember now, these are a bunch of investment analysts from the big cities. Well, a coyote started howling, and hoot owls hooting, and half of these analysts stayed up all night around the campfire because they couldn't sleep. We decided it wasn't the best idea to try something like this with folks who weren't accustomed to camping on the rocks in sleeping bags."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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