Walmart "isn't a unicorn, and it's no longer sexy," Quartz asserts. But there's no denying that the No. 1 company on the Fortune 500 list is a retail powerhouse that seems nearly impossible to overtake. Some astonishing details about how it continues to dominate:
- With $482 billion in revenue under its big-box belt, Walmart sells more than another trio of giants combined: Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Its revenue figure comes in as higher than the GDP of Poland (and a lot of other countries included in the International Monetary Fund's 2015 ranking).
- Walmart boasts 11,500 stores around the globe, visited by 260 million customers each week—and it got that way by "annihilating Main Street," Quartz notes, undercutting the "clothing, appliance, and dry goods stores that were once the heart of local commerce."
- With more than 2 million workers, Walmart is the third-largest employer on Earth (only the DOD and China's People's Liberation Army claim more workers, per Forbes). That workforce means it had to pull $2.7 billion out of its wallet when it agreed in January to raise wages of 1.2 million workers to a full-time average of $13.38 an hour and a part-time average of $10.58.
- The retailer continues to innovate and experiment, including testing grocery delivery via partnerships with Uber and Lyft, per the San Francisco Chronicle, and coming up with an ambitious plan for a drone workforce, as recently explained by ZDNet.com.
(Now if it can just get its
calls to local police stations under control…)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
