Glass takes donkey ride down old memory lane - celebrating 25 year anniversary of Harrison, Arkansas' Wal-Mart; David Glass, Wal-Mart president, rides donkey

Ark. Unit Celebrates 25 Years

Glass Takes Donkey Ride Down Old Memory Lane

HARRISON, Ark. -- It took 25 years, but on a hot, muggy day here this month Wal-Mart president David Glass finally had to eat some disparaging remarks he made when the chain opened its second store, in this small Ozark Mountain town.

Longtime associates like Charlie Cates, the original store manager, and 20-year-plus employees Grace McCutcheon and Veena Biggs--not to mention chairman Sam Walton--cheered as Glass showed he could be as good a sport as anyone.

At a ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of a store that helped pave the way for the phenomenal success of the Wal-Mart retail chain, store manager Bill Lovell read from a Fortune magazine article (Jan. 30, 1989) that quoted Glass' first impressions of Wal-Mart and its founder:

"In 1962 Walton opened the first Wal-Mart in Rogers, Ark., near Bentonville. Meanwhile, in Missouri, David Glass, head of a successful drug retailing chain, heard about Sam and came to the grand opening of the second Wal-Mart, in Harrison, Ark. `It was the worst retail store I had ever seen,' recalled Glass. `Sam brought a few watermelon trucks in and stacked them on the sidewalk. He had donkey rides in the parking lot. It was 115 degrees, and the watermelons began to pop, and the donkeys began to do what donkeys do, and it all mixed together and ran all over the parking lot. And when you went inside the store, the mess just continued. He was a nice fellow, but I wrote him off. It was just terrible.'"

With about 100 current store associates, retired employees, headquarters' executives, vendors and local officials gathered in the parking lot, Glass admitted, "The dumbest thing I ever did was make that statement about the Harrison store."

Then, looking warily over his shoulder at a gray donkey, pulling at its tether to the side of the small grandstand setup, Glass added, "I'm beginning to think the second dumbest thing was coming here!"

To the uproarious laughter and approval of all present, Glass donned a straw hat and a pair of overalls (presented by "Hee-Haw" TV show star George Lindsay on behalf of Liberty Trouser Company) and good-naturedly mounted the donkey.

"It's not going to damage Wal-Mart's image too much to have a picture of our president on a jackass?" asked the chairman, who declined an offer to follow Glass in the saddle.

Harrison (pop. 10,985) is located in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas, 80 miles east of Wal-Mart's Bentonville headquarters. The original Wal-Mart store in Harrison that Glass visited in 1963 actually opened across a creek from the current site. Walton and his brother Bud converted a 12,000-square-foot furniture and appliance store, paying rent of about 60 cents per square foot and spending less than $50,000 to outfit the store with fixtures.

Referring to Glass' "watermelon" story about the opening, Walton pointed to the current Wal-Mart store--which was relocated to an 80,000-square-foot site and renovated a number of times over the years--and asked, "Haven't we come a long, long way?"

Walton, who always manages to combine heavy doses of hyperbole and sincerity in his public appearances, added, "This is the finest Wal-Mart store in the world!"

Glass moderated his earlier comments about the store.

"The Harrison store was about as bad as I said it was, but what I didn't count on was the quality of the people here and the leadership of the chairman," he said.

Walton acknowledged that the original Harrison store wasn't a store designer's dream. But, it encompassed the key ingredients in the Wal-Mart success formula.

"Even though the store looked bad, we kept expenses and overhead low so we could undersell all those other stores," said Walton, adding that good people and high quality merchandise were other factors that propelled the chain to its current 1,400 stores and 251,000 employees.

Harrison Store Was Catalyst

Glass stressed the important role the Harrison store played in the Wal-Mart story. "This store was as important to the growth of Wal-Mart as any other store," continued Glass. "This store was the catalyst. The company would not be where it is today if not for the success of this store."

Glass noted that the profits from the store provided funding for the opening of at least 50 to 60 subsequent Wal-Mart units. "We also trained an awful lot of our management here," he added. "There would not be a Wal-Mart company today if this store failed."

The ceremony took on the air of a homecoming as Lovell introduced other longtime employees including Terry English, a Wal-Mart district manager in Oklahoma who with Lovell started as an hourly worker in Harrison; Tom Jefferson, a retired operations vp; Ray Thomas and Mike Gammon, retired regional vps; and Bob Cook, who succeeded Cates as manager in Harrison and currently runs a Wal-Mart in Kansas.

For a while, Glass thought he could avoid the inevitable confrontation: "Now that I said all these nice things, y'all are not going to make me get up on that donkey?"

Nice try, Dave.

PHOTO : David Glass mounts donkey at Harrison, Ark., store, 25 years after visiting Wal-Mart for

PHOTO : first time.

PHOTO : There at the beginning: Ex-manager Charlie Cates and Grace McCutcheon, a 22-year Harrison

PHOTO : store associate.

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