Walmart is a world-class innovator in supply chain management, retail engineering, shipping logistics, inventory tracking... the list just goes on and on.
Walmart is one of those things that is just so effective and so pervasive that we forget how important its original ideas are. It's like learning to like music in 2003 and hearing the Pixies for the first time and not getting it; you don't realize that virtually all of pop/rock music for the last 20 years is built on stuff they popularized.
But unlike the Pixies, Walmart has ruthlessly refined and improved their systems instead of breaking up the band with a faxed message from Black Francis.
Point being: innovation isn't always easy to spot in a simple paragraph on a message board.
Walmart is one of those things that is just so effective and so pervasive that we forget how important its original ideas are. It's like learning to like music in 2003 and hearing the Pixies for the first time and not getting it; you don't realize that virtually all of pop/rock music for the last 20 years is built on stuff they popularized.
But unlike the Pixies, Walmart has ruthlessly refined and improved their systems instead of breaking up the band with a faxed message from Black Francis.
Point being: innovation isn't always easy to spot in a simple paragraph on a message board.