When we arrived in the much smaller town of Bentonville in 1950, we found almost no spirit of competition. A few retailers were scattered around the square, but each of them had sort of carved out their niche, and that was that. If a store didn’t have something the customer wanted, he or she would just have to drive to Rogers, or Springdale, or very possibly on into Fayetteville. Using some of the things we had learned in Newport, I’d have to say we changed that way of thinking right off and generally sparked up the atmosphere around town.
