Guardians of Grail

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Mart is America's largest corporation,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]
(FORTUNE Magazine) How did a peddler of cheap shirts and fishing rods become the mightiest corporation in America,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]? The short version of Wal-Mart's rise to glory goes something like this: In 1979 it racked up a billion dollars in sales. By 1993 it did that much business in a week,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]; by 2001 it could do it in a day,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych].
It's a stunning tale--one that propelled Wal-Mart from rural Arkansas, where it was founded in 1962, to the top of the FORTUNE 500 this year. Sam Walton, Wal-Mart's founder, pushed sales growth relentlessly while squeezing costs with sophisticated information technology. He exhorted employees to sell better with quasi-biblical precepts like the "ten-foot rule" (greet customers if they are that close). He was, in other words,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], an early evangelist for the first commandment of today's economy: Service rules.
Wal-Mart, in fact, is the first service company to rise to the top of the FORTUNE 500. (Before 1994, FORTUNE listed service and industrial companies separately, but no service company was ever larger than the top industrial ones.) When FORTUNE first published its list of the largest companies in America in 1955,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Wal-Mart didn't even exist. That year General Motors was America's biggest company, and in every year that followed, either GM or another mighty industrial, Exxon, was No. 1.
Wal-Mart's achievement caps a bigger economic shift--from producing goods to providing services--that's been happening for years. employment peaked in 1953, at 35%. It has been declining steadily since. In the decade that will end in 2010,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures that goods-producing industries (brawny work like mining, construction, and manufacturing) will create 1.3 million new jobs, compared to 20 million for service industries. To look at it another way, today there are about four times as many people working in service jobs as in other kinds of jobs. And even within manufacturing, services are an increasingly large share of operations. GE, for example, makes the lion's share of its revenues from finance operations, which is why FORTUNE lists it as a service company.
A look at 1955 helps to explain why America has gone in this direction. Plywood, Shoe Corporation of America,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and Consolidated Cigar. Those companies reflect a society in which supplying basic needs--food, clothing, heat,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the occasional cigar--took a big bite out of the household budget. In fact, families then spent almost twice as much of their income on food as they do now.
As America got richer--the average household today earns about twice the income, in real terms, it did in 1955--consumption got more complicated. With more income to throw around, people started spending more on services--movies and travel, mortgages to buy houses, insurance to protect those houses, the occasional decadent weekend at a luxury hotel--and less on, say, plywood or corn products. Economists call this a shift in the demand pattern; FORTUNE calls it the main reason that 64 of this year's top 100 are service companies.
Wal-Mart got its share of America's disposable income. But that's not all it's done. The rise of Wal-Mart, muses Claudia Goldin, an economic historian at Harvard, reminds her a lot of flour. And meatpacking. Until the early 20th century,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], she explains, even smallish towns housed a mill where housewives brought wheat to be ground and a slaughterhouse where farmers brought their doomed stock. But technological innovations, combined with the vision of people with names like Pillsbury, Armour, and Swift, changed the way people got their flour and meat. Pillsbury made thousands of tiny flour mills obsolete; Wal-Mart did the same with mom-and-pop shops.
For workers, the shift to services has changed the labor market in two important ways. One has been to damage unions. Union officials swear they can thrive in a service economy, but the fact remains that service-sector workers are half as likely to be organized as those in manufacturing.
The other change has been the upgrading of work. This is a good thing--good because higher-skill jobs pay more and are typically less deadly than lower-skill ones. The proportion of people working in the kinds of clean, high-status positions Mom approves of has risen from less than 20% in 1955 to more than 30% today. The bad part of this scenario is the disappearance of jobs that paid well but did not require much in the way of skills. As late as 1969, a quarter of jobs required no more than an eighth-grade education. No longer. income inequality since the late 1970s.
Look at it this way. Over the next few years,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], only three of the ten fastest-growing occupations (software engineers, nurses, and computer support) pay middle-class salaries. The rest could be called, well, Wal-Mart kinds of jobs--cashiers, retail assistants, food service, and so on. In short, the service economy is delivering more good jobs than ever before. But the bad jobs are worse, at least in terms of pay, than the bad ones they replaced.
Despite the fall in manufacturing employment, its share of the economy, 17.3%, is almost exactly what it was in 1955, and 201 companies of this year's FORTUNE 500 are classified as industrial. (Indeed, the following story features one of the biggest, No. 2 Exxon Mobil.) How did manufacturing hold its share? Industry got smarter. manufacturing. Instead,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the sector transformed itself, increasing productivity, improving operations, and shedding low-skill, low-margin operations. Today, he says, "brains are what counts."
You'll see some of those smarts in the stories featured in this issue. David Stipp tells how Amgen is burning brainpower to develop sophisticated biotech therapies, while Nelson Schwartz charts how Duke Energy became the un-Enron by resisting financing tricks,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], complex partnerships, and other Wall street fads. In an illustration of how the service ethic has infiltrated manufacturing, Stephanie Mehta describes how Pat Russo, Lucent's new CEO, plans to revive the telecom-equipment company by making customers happy.
That sentiment may be Sam Walton's real legacy. All times are ET. Disclaimer
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Market indexes are shown in real time, except for the DJIA,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer
LIBOR Warning: Neither BBA Enterprises Limited, nor the BBA LIBOR Contributor Banks, nor Reuters, can be held liable for any irregularity or inaccuracy of BBA LIBOR. Disclaimer.
Morningstar: 2013 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer
The Dow Jones IndexesSM are proprietary to and distributed by Dow Jones Company,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Inc. and have been licensed for use. All content of the Dow Jones IndexesSM 2013 is proprietary to Dow Jones Company, Inc.
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