Walmart is based in Bentonville, Arkansas, just a few miles from Sam Walton’s first Walmart store in Rogers. Although Walmart currently operates out of a nondescript building that doesn’t seem to match its power and scale, the company is in the midst of building a massive new corporate headquarters on the east side of town. The new offices are designed in the style of a college campus, with twelve buildings spread over 350 acres, and with a price tag estimated to be $1 billion.
Bentonville is sometimes called Vendorville because its economy is built around Walmart and all its vendors. I’ve visited Bentonville several times over the years. I first popped in on a whim in 2018 after attending an agriculture show in Little Rock. It’s a charming town of over fifty thousand people that struck me as something out of "The Truman Show." During most of the twentieth century, the town’s population hovered around two thousand to three thousand people, but it exploded in tandem with the growth of Walmart.
