JAMES MCCONKEY, OF ALBANY, MO. (pop. 2,100), never cried. But he felt a sadness the nights before Christmas 1985, standing in his tiny hardware store on the west side of his town square. He remembers it vividly today. A dream smashed.
Shiny new bicycles were lined up, prices cut to the core. Appliances filled the counters. Holiday decorations festooned the windows. Everything there . . . except customers. Some evenings when McConkey looked beyond the twinkling lights out over the square, he could not see a single car. He knew where they were.
Two months earlier a Wal-Mart store had opened in Maryville (pop. 9,500), 34 miles west, and one month earlier another had opened in Bethany (pop. 3,100), 18 miles east. Their parking lots were full of McConkey's neighbors and friends, lured there through the winter's cold by the powerful Wal-Mart merchandising mystique and retail prices often below his wholesale cost. He thought then, and thinks today, that he and his partner and brother Richard did everything right to withstand the normal merchandising revolution of the past 40 years brought by good roads, city malls and the early discounters like K Mart.
Back in 1982, James, 28, and Richard, 31, decided they wanted their own business in a community where the McConkey family had farmed and worked more than a century. They borrowed money and bought out the Gamble hardware store, tore out 100-year-old wood shelves, spruced it up, offered long shopping hours and personal service. For three years the McConkey brothers prospered. Sometimes when the square was filled and bustling, friends trading with friends, families greeting families, James thought "it looked like an old postcard." This was a life he cherished. Nobody got really rich. Their wealth was in the closeness and vitality of the community. Then came Wal-Mart.
In January 1989, after another dismal Christmas, the McConkeys gave up. So did four other merchants around the Albany town square. For a while the McConkey store stood empty; then the town bulldozed it with others to make way for a Place's store, a regional general merchandiser that was already on the Albany square. The old Place's is empty. James McConkey is now teaching school and driving a school bus. His brother has a job with a paper-products firm.
When Sam Moore Walton died a week ago after a long battle with cancer, he was eulogized -- and rightly so -- as a man who had transformed American merchandising and perfected a hands-on management that instilled a sense of team enthusiasm among the 380,000 employees he liked to refer to as "associates." In the process, he became America's richest person, his family's wealth estimated at $23 billion. But he also became the patron saint of a down-home style of megawealth; eschewing the fancy trappings of power, "Mr. Sam" drove an '88 Ford pickup truck and hopped around the country to visit stores, take the pulse of consumers and inspire his workers. His passion, his joy, was fine-tuning his vast merchandising network by insisting on such things as brighter smiles and cheerier "Good mornings" to customers from store workers, as well as offering the latest products gathered and stocked through the most sophisticated and efficient inventory technology available.