“After graduating from college, Walton started in sales at J. C. Penney in 1940, then enlisted for the war in 1942. In 1945, he started managing a franchise Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas (where the population was then seven thousand). By 1950 he was running two stores in Newport and had achieved reasonable success by experimenting and innovating. One of his innovative ideas that had been a massive hit with his customers was an ice cream machine. As he writes in his autobiography, “Every crazy thing we tried hadn’t turned out as well as the ice cream machine, of course, but we hadn’t made any mistakes we couldn’t correct quickly, none so big that they threatened the business.”