While growinng Wal-Mart into the world’s foremost retailer, Sam Walton was big on dropping into stores. He wanted his “associates” to see him, he wanted to learn from them too, plus he wanted to rally them.
The "problem" was that Wal-Mart stores eventually numbered in the thousands. How to drop in in the way he always had? Technology proved helpful. As Walton biographer Vance Trimble explained it, the solution in 1985 was a $16 million purchase of a “Ku-band ‘hub station’ at headquarters consisting of a 9-meter antenna dish and ‘personal earth stations’ (PES) with smaller 1.8-meter dishes at the stores and warehouses.” The $16 million spent on the “hub station” ($50,000/month extra for satellite time) proved a money saver in that Walton could now speak to his hundreds of thousands of associates at the same time, and he could do all of this from Bentonville, AR.
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