We Sell For Less

Artificial Intelligence and Wal Mart

There’s a lot of little towns along Highway 64 in Arkansas.

Towns like Bald Knob, Russellville, Clarksville, and Alma. Towns, that in 1950, were connected by the same catfish and bass that swam through the Little Red River, the same elm and hickory trees that dotted the land, and the same sun-beaten, two-lane highway that ran through the state. Most of the people who lived in those little towns worked on small farms growing cotton or soybeans, or maybe for the town, or for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Again, this was 1950, before the days when I-40 was built, before the South was integrated, before there was color television, microwaves, or super glue.

Not many people had made it out of those little towns and gone on to any kind of fame. Notoriety, maybe. Bill Doolin had made it out of Clarksville to help found the Wild Bunch in the 1890s. He made a name for himself robbing trains and banks, only to wind up dead at the hands of a U.S. Marshal named Heck Thomas somewhere in the Oklahoma Territory. But in 1950, a former U.S. Army captain who had settled in Arkansas after the war drove those cracked, two-lane highways from Newport, through Bald Knob, Conway, Russellville, Clarksville, Alma on Route 64 before connecting to Route 71 through Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers, before finally arriving in Bentonville, Arkansas, which then had a population of around 2,900. The man came to open a store. His name was Sam Walton.

Born in Oklahoma, Walton was 32 years old. He had attended the University of Missouri and three days after graduating, accepted a job as a management trainee at J.C. Penney in Des Moines, Iowa. After serving stateside in the U.S. Army during WWII, Walton and his wife moved to Newport, Arkansas in 1945 where he opened a Ben Franklin store on Front Street after securing a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law. Walton realized quickly that in order to stand out, even among the mom-and-pop stores in rural Arkansas, he needed to provide a reason for customers to come in and return time after time.

To do that, he opened earlier and closed later than competitors, greeted customers personally, cut costs on every item, allowed customers to browse rather than have a clerk get every item, and crucially, Walton traveled those cracked, two-lane highways to buy items as cheaply as possible from wholesalers. Within five years, his store became the top-performing Ben Franklin in the area, doubling his store’s sales.

Yet Walton had made a grave error: he didn’t own his store, and one day the landlord decided to yank Walton’s lease and give it over to his son. So, at 32, Walton went back to those two-lane highways and found another little town to open his own store, called Walton’s 5 & 10 at 105 Main Street in Bentonville. He used the same strategies he had learned in Newport, undercutting the competition and developing relationships with customers so they felt a connection to Walton personally. In time, Walton opened a second store in Fayetteville, then along with his brother Bud, several more stores in Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas. Eventually, after developing 15 stores, Walton opened a larger store in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962 that became his next venture: Wal Mart.

The new store’s motto: “We Sell For Less. Satisfaction Guaranteed.”

Over the ensuing decades, Wal Mart became one of the largest companies in American history and changed Americans’ relationship with retail shopping. By the time Walton died in 1992, there were over 1,700 Wal Marts, which had made Walton himself a billionaire in the process. However, through it all, Walton valued the employees he called “associates,” whom he worked with side by side in the early days. While most of them worked for minimum wage, often part time, there were over 380,000 Wal Mart employees in 1992. That year, the federal minimum wage was $4.25 an hour.

Today, in 2025, the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, which in today’s dollars, earns less than it did in 1992. In fact, the minimum wage today earns less than it did when Walton opened the 5&10 in 1950, and when he opened the first Wal Mart in 1962. Over time, American corporations have valued its low wage workers less and less, as the rich continue to get richer and the poor continue to get poorer.

And now, it appears, corporate America might get rid of workers altogether.

In 2025, Wal Mart is the largest private employer in America. The company that began in Sam Walton’s imagination now employs 1.6 million Americans, and another 500,000 people around the world. Each one of those people relies on their wages, which the company reports is around $18 an hour for a “frontline associate,” higher than the federal minimum wage. Still, across a 40-hour work week, $18 an hour works out to roughly $37,440 in a year before taxes.

This past week, Wal Mart’s CEO, Doug McMillon, acknowledged what few executives have so far: that almost every single worker on the planet is at risk from the rise of artificial intelligence. McMillon said, “It’s very clear that A.I. is going to change literally every job,” continuing, “maybe there’s a job in the world that A.I. won’t change, but I haven’t thought of it.” That it to say, this isn’t just a low wage worker issue. It’s a problem for everyone. In July, Ford Motor’s CEO Jim Farley said, “Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.” And that is likely a vast understatement.

To say it in plain terms: artificial intelligence isn’t rising on its own—yet, anyway. It is rising in relevance because corporations are investing in A.I. at an unprecedented rate. According to the Wall Street Journal, tech companies have spent more money in the last three years to build A.I. data centers than it cost to build the Interstate Highway system, which replaced the little two-lane highways that Sam Walton drove to build his empire. These data centers will soon require as much power in one center as entire cities do. As Bloomberg recently reported, for those living near an A.I. data center, electricity now costs 267% more per month than it did five years ago.

At a recent White House summit for America’s tech oligarchs, Mark Zuckerburg estimated that his company will spend over $600 billion on A.I. investment in the next three years. Zuckerburg and others are free to do with their money what they want. But let’s be clear exactly what they are doing: spending billions and billions of dollars to replace American workers, leaving those people to fend for themselves without the meager, too-low wages they have now. But it’s not just Meta, or Wal Mart workers. Already, A.I. coupled with the unstable global outlook has cut one third of jobs available for recent college graduates in the past year alone, according to the Financial Times. These are graduates that likely have student debt who will be forced to live at home, blunting their social lives, friendship networks, and romantic outlooks. It’s just one way that A.I. will continue to devalue education itself, which as historically low reading rates indicate, is already on the decline.

Artificial Intelligence has benefits, especially when it comes to breakthroughs in medical research and services. To be clear, I am not a luddite. But, for the most part, overinvestment and over-reliance on A.I. may well be the defining mistake of the 21st Century. It is a convenience being used by tech leaders to increase their power, and to make jobless citizens more dependent upon the algorithms they create. Feeding fake, slop videos into our algorithms that have people increasingly believing anything they see on their screens, and thus numbing the minds of nearly every person on the planet is a mistake, to say the least. Ensuring that a seventh grader can get every bit of information from ChatGPT so they don’t have to read To Kill a Mockingbird is a mistake. The end of imagination is a mistake. And turning over military intelligence to autonomous A.I. is a mistake, with potentially catastrophic consequences on a scale never even seen in any World War.

If all of this sounds dystopian and dire, it is because it absolutely is.

This is not a matter of whistling past the graveyard—it’s digging the hole ourselves and smiling while we do it. We are investing more money than has ever been invested in a tool that makes us stupider and takes away our jobs. And in the United States, we have a government that is incapable of solving the problem or even understanding what A.I. is. The average age of Congress is around 60 years old, and many of them seem uninterested and simply unable to grasp the problem at hand. This is a bipartisan problem: both parties have been beholden to Silicon Valley for too long. That goes for Obama’s full-on embrace of Silicon Valley during his two terms, and now worse, Trump’s decision to hand the keys to tech leaders who literally want to take over the world. No one is absolved from the unfolding mess. Democrats have no plan or alternative to the A.I. onslaught, while Republicans already have Peter Thiel’s protégé, J.D. Vance, as the president in waiting.

And to be clear: no story, including President Trump’s second term performance, will be as impactful compared to the threat of a cabal of billionaires who control the levers on the most powerful machine in the history of humanity. Obsessing over things like Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension or the arrest of Jim Comey, or a government shutdown is meaningless compared to the gravity of what might come. We are entering a new age of uncertainty, one that could spiral out of control much sooner than perhaps we are led to believe. Right now, business and tech leaders are conducting a cost analysis of humanity itself, and it appears, whether we live in big cities working white collar jobs or in small little Arkansas towns off Route 64 growing soybeans, we might all be on the chopping block.

Sources:

https://archive.org/details/samwaltonmadeina00walt

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/walmart-ceo-doug-mcmillon-ai-job-losses-dbaca3aa

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-white-collar-job-loss-b9856259

https://www.ft.com/content/62e7cf87-1ebe-41fd-9d15-dd0a75ad4d86

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-electricity-prices/