Ep. 2 - Leading by Example: Mentorship and the Walmart Legacy with Mel Redman

Company culture is the lifeblood of sustainable growth, yet it is often treated as a corporate buzzword rather than an operational strategy. When scaling an organization at breakneck speed, the risk of losing your core values increases exponentially. In this episode of Between the Aisles, legendary retail executive Mel Redman sits down to discuss how genuine operational culture serves as the ultimate engine for business growth, sharing firsthand accounts of expanding a global footprint without losing the corporate soul.

We sit down to discuss the exact operational mechanics required to manage hypergrowth during the foundational eras of retail. Mel gets into his early days with the company starting in 1978, the high-stakes conversion to front-end scanning, and the logistical realities of running store planning during a period of opening over one hundred locations a year. We unpack the massive undertaking of the 1994 Woolco Canada acquisition, where a handpicked transition team had to align thirty-eight thousand legacy SKUs with standard modular layouts, navigate strict national bilingual compliance laws, and win over a fearful workforce. Mel also reveals the leadership philosophies of Sam Walton, highlighting the distinct difference between executing a corporate directive and keeping field associates genuinely motivated.

The reality of executing this level of growth means dealing with immense pressure, rigid deadlines, and the brutal schedule of setup teams living out of suitcases forty-two weeks a year. Mel shares the harder lessons of international expansions, from racking up thousands of dollars in compliance fines to the difficult career re-entry process talent faces when returning from foreign expat assignments. Viewers will walk away with a profound mindset shift regarding corporate culture, moving it away from human resources theory and placing it squarely on the frontline execution map.

If you care about organizational leadership, scalable operational systems, and the history of global retail execution, you’ll get a lot from this conversation. Please make sure to subscribe and share this episode with a colleague. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below: What is the most difficult aspect of keeping your team aligned during a period of rapid organizational change?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to Between the Isles. I'm your host, John Reeves, and I'm very excited about this podcast. We're going to talk about something that doesn't get talked about a whole lot on these podcasts. We're going to talk about culture and how important it is to a company. And um, you know, I was reading on LinkedIn the other day and I came across a bio on LinkedIn that um that somebody had taught had uh used the term culture champion to describe themselves. And I started thinking about, well, what is a culture champion? And I got to tell you, the the name that came to my mind immediately was the gentleman that's my guest today. Uh welcome Mel Redman. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. So, Mel, why don't you uh uh tell the people here that may not know you uh what your positions were with Walmart, but in your Walmart career. I tell you, I was so fortunate to come to work for Walmart. I was working for a company called Sterling Store Magic Mart. I'd been with them like six years. And I was in the OCL, Arkansas unit, and we didn't have a lot of company visit our stores in the in that old company I just mentioned. And one day this very sharp, articulate, personable guy came in my store. He had a notebook in his hand, and he said, I wondered if I could look at your store. I said, Yes, sir. I showed him everything. I didn't have any idea that he didn't work for us. His interest in the store was as if he did work there. And so we spent about an hour going through the store, and he shook my hand and said, Thank you very much. I said, You're most welcome. Come back anytime. The next day, personnel, Vivian Dunaway, you probably remember her, John, called me. And that's when I found out who was in my store. She said, Mr. Walton wanted me to call you and see if you'd like to come to work. And I said, That's who that was. So that's the way I started. I joined the company as an assistant manager in Sykes, Missouri. Was there for a short time. I was on setup most of the time because we were really opening stores. I think we had 165 at that time, 1978. I think that's right. I might be a little off on that number. But I'd done uh Anna, Illinois, in Corning, Arkansas. Got back to the store just before Thanksgiving, and after Christmas, Tom Jefferson, exec VP of Operations, called me. We had just purchased a few gifts and discount stores, and Cersei was that was a takeover. And so I ran that store for about three years, and then became a district manager in Texas, lived in Bryan, Texas. My district changed because of the amount of stores that we were opening. My district changed about four times. And, you know, as far as the stores I had, I did that for three years. And then in 1983, I was opening Palestine, Texas, and got a phone call from Jack Shoemaker, and it was about 7 o'clock at night. And that wasn't a good time because Mr. Shoemaker called you at 7 o'clock at night. So he had an assistant named Phyllis Felkins, who was one of the nicest people I ever met. I called the office as instructed, got Phyllis, and she said, Oh, yes, Mr. Shoemaker and Mr. Jefferson are waiting on you. I said, Oh no, wait, wait, what's going on? She said, It's okay. Put me on the speaker phone and outlined the fact that we were going to go full-blown scanning at the front end. You know, and that's not been that long ago, if you think. Right. I remember those days. It was the beginning of the data warehouse and the capturing of items sold. And I didn't really, I wasn't really excited about doing that. But Mr. Shoemaker, you know, convinced me I need to do that. So I did that for a year, and then I became a regional vice president of Region 8. I ran Region 8 for about a year and a half, and then I took Region 2, which was my old most of my stores. I think I I had had 47 of those stores at one time as a district manager. So I was a uh regional vice president in Texas, traveled out of Bentville, and then in 1986, Mr. Walton caught me in the hall and wanted me to run store planning. And I really didn't want to do that, but it was in the cards. So I ran store planning for seven years, and probably the most fun time I ever had in a job. And in 1993, at the end of the year, um, Mr. Glass, the president of the company at the time, Mr. Glass and and um Rob Walton asked me to go to Canada and acquire Wolco Canada on behalf of Walmart. And so he gave me two airplanes to use because we had to travel to all stores as we had a 60-day period uh of due diligence. So we would leave out of Toronto Pearson on Monday, and one plane would fly west, another would fly east, and we tried to see all those stores as we hand-picked our team, which John, you were one of those people who were hand-picked. We had 27 people up there. And the job was started out more about redoing the stores and turning them into Walmart stores, but it really became more about people than it was anything. I remember when Wol Woolco, Woolworth, S.W. Woolworth came in and announced in an all associate meeting in the home office that they were selling the company to Walmart. And I remember looking at those people's faces who had been there 10, 15, 25, 30 years, and they it was as if they'd lost their best friend. And we started then trying to spread the Walmart culture to uh FW Woolworth Canada operation. And when we were done, I do believe that most people thought that they had met Southwalton. Uh I don't know if you ever heard that or not, but they would quote him all the time. So I think we we were able to transfer that culture to that company in Canada. Came back home and was senior VP of operations for the Western part of the United States. And then in June of '96, '95, I decided I was going to go out on my own and I did. So I had a wonderful career at Walmart. Lots of fun. Yeah, I uh I'll vouch for that. Uh and and like you said, uh I was part of that Canada transition team that you led. And I would add, too, that if they thought that they had met Sam Walton themselves, it's probably because they came pretty close from the individual that you were and the way that you handled that company and that transition. But I wanted to start uh talking, we're talking about culture here. I want to start talking about store planning. And and back in the time that you ran store planning from 1986 to 94. Through 94. That was a very, very large growth time for Walmart. I was, if I remember right, we were opening 120 or so stores a year. We were remodeling uh even more. And so the group that you led, um store planning, they were like the first uh anybody that was hired to work for Walmart for one of the new stores, their first exposure to the Walmart culture came from somebody in store planning. That's right. It was a very important job. And our setup supervisors and office training supervisors did such an incredible job of teaching, coaching, and spreading the culture throughout states like California. Right. Um, all up in the northwest, all the northwestern states. And the only thing they knew about Walmart was they they'd probably read about it, heard about it, but they didn't know really the what the guts of it was. And it was all about people. And I used to tell my store plan people, the job will get done. We got fixture week and then six weeks of store set up and training. The job will get done. How those people feel about it when it's done is what's so important. Do they they feel like they've accomplished and learned? Yes. And how do they carry that on, you know, as they're on their own, uh, you know, operating a Walmart store. So it was a critical uh time for us to spread that culture. You know, even when we went to Canada, John, uh I had people tell me up in Toronto that we could not get people to do a Walmart share. Right. Yeah. And they proved them wrong right away. Yeah, and they did it. And and as we explained to them, it was a celebration of our company. It wasn't it wasn't hokey or something that came from Arkansas. It was a celebration of the fact that we were going to be the biggest and number one retail company in the world someday. And they believed that. So something to cheer about. It was something to cheer about. But I had a I had a meeting of the sad district, and I I took a took a plane and and met all the western provinces stores in Calgary, Alberta. And then we had a meeting in Montreal for all the Ontario and Eastern province stores. And I did, you probably tell by listen to me, I don't speak French. So I had this hour-long rah-rah meeting telling people they hadn't seen anything yet. You we called it You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, which was coined off of Bachman Turner Overdrive, a Canadian just happened to be a Canadian band hit song. And I did one hour, and I had a um district manager from Montreal who kind of became my tutor on culture and and and traditions in um in the French market from you know eastern Ontario all through Quebec. And I asked him, I said, uh, how do you think it went? He said, all good. I said, you think they understood? He said, oh no, sir, most of them don't speak English. So I was kind of, I had to get educated on what part of the country I was in before I took off with English, you know, and fast as I talked anyway. But yeah, it was uh, yeah, I'll never forget this guy's name. He said, My name is Michelle Rivet. And I said, excuse me? He said, Michelle Rivé. I said, from now on, you're Michael Rivet. So that way I don't pronounce your name wrong. But we became very close friends and and working compadres. So I was, you know, I'm talking about store planning. Um, I actually was on a setup, a few setups early in my career when I was a young man. Uh, and I remember the excitement that was created around it. Yes, uh, the first thing you did was learn the Walmart chair. Um, and the the groups would they would bring everybody together several times a day. Uh, I remember the zone defense where he would clean, you know, everybody stop what you're doing, pick up all the trash and clean. There was a discipline to it, but it was also a lot of fun. There was. I was thinking about the types of individuals that that you looked for uh for store planning. And I remember very vividly on one setup that I had, Bill Kinney. Bill Kinney was great. And very and he also Bill Kinney also came with you to Canada. He was one of those guys that that had a lot of and he could contribute a lot. And uh he was. But the thing that I remember very well, and I still, you know, I still contact Bill Kinney every now and then. He's a great guy. Uh and uh but I think store planning had, in in my opinion, a culture within a Walmart culture. I I think you're exactly right uh until you told me that I'd never heard it put quite that way, but that's exactly what it was. Everybody in store planning, everybody in store planning was very close. And it was a bond, right? Probably forged from hard work. Right. And the things that they had to do that was different from working in or managing a Walmart store. These these setup supervisors like Bill Kenney and Harold Lee Son and Mike Velines and Mike Campbell, Doug Dooley, who are the most talented people we had, they lived out of a suitcase. And when you set a store, a Walmart store, you were there for a fixture week and six weeks of store setup, and then you basically just handed the key over to the store manager and district manager, and you left and went to the next project. So they were on the they were on the road about 42 weeks out of the year. And it took a very special person. So first of all, they had to have perseverance because it wasn't easy. That's some of the things they had to do, like, you know, finishing up construction while you're sitting a store. And, you know, they had they were under a lot of pressure to get the job done. It was a deadline. There's a definitely a deadline. And it was really, you know, you probably remember this, John. We used to put a store map on a big piece of cardboard and stand it up where everybody could see it. And as we completed an area and all the monsters were checked, we'd kind of highlight that. So we it was really a map to what else we had to do. And you you could fall behind very easily, so you had to stay on top of it. And then just the enthusiasm that they carried with them. Yeah, it was like I think you and I talked earlier about, well, they didn't think we could get people to do a Walmart cheer, a real Walmart chair in Canada. They didn't think that in California either. Right. Well, we expanded out there, but guess what? The culture spread. Right. And there's there was an old saying then, and probably I don't know if it's still now, but you gotta get the culture or the culture will get you. Right. I mean it it kind of it kind of self-disciplined itself. And you could tell pretty much when you had somebody hired, whether it was in store planning or a store or whatever it was, you could kind of tell if they were gonna, you know, be able to sustain that in about the first three or four weeks. And some of them didn't, but a whole lot of them did. And made came up through the ranks. I don't know how many managers and district managers today we got to start as hourly associate. Right. You know, so yeah, it was uh it was a special kind of person. I know I list some names out, but you know, Harold Eason was the first store playing person I met when I went on setup. Oh, okay. And Harold, for those that people who don't know, he he was about 6'7, yeah. And you know, slender built, but he had this knack, if he was talking to you about something serious, he could put his leg up on a shelf that was about even with my head. And, you know, I remember my enthusiasm in Anna, Illinois. I was sitting candy, and I got candy set, and I'm looking around, and I knew it had to be signed off on. And I said, okay, a couple hours sources are working with me, I'll just fill it up. I know it's right. So here comes Mr. Eason, and he hadn't signed off on it. So we got to unload it all and sample it back out. It was a very valuable lesson for me because I never filled anything up before we signed off on before that. So that was part of the discipline of uh store planning. You had to you had to follow the the guidelines because it was so uh and it was somewhat rigid, but a lot of fun too. I mean, you had to you had to get everything you had to follow the protocol, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. We used to say that the the the blueprint that came in the deal box. A deal box had everything in it. It was a big crate. Okay. And the blueprint was in there. And what print came in the deal box was the print we were going to set, the modulars, because several things tied together with that. New store merchandise ordered the merchandise for the store from that same print. Right. And it it really we couldn't, we could not let it be subject to personal opinion, you know, which there was a lot of, and not that those opinions were bad. It's just like the print that comes in the deal box matches the new store merchandise, and that's what we're gonna set right there. And so that was kind of our that was really the only major uh rule that we had, and everything else kind of fell in place. So yeah, it was uh it it was it was a tough job being a setup supervisor. Yeah, it was. Um and what a great contribution those guys made to the company and the culture, and and you know, there's a lot of people that are with Walmart today that may have started their career or did start their career uh on a store setup. Yep. Uh and so being able to to get those people to buy into the culture and then spread the culture further to uh to other people. That was kind of the magic in uh of Walmart. And I think, you know, at the 80s, we weren't the biggest retailer there. Kmart was a lot bigger, Sears was a lot bigger. And um I think that most people would look at Walmart and go, well, you know, we can duplicate what they're doing. We we can go to the store and see their pricing. Um, we can understand the way they distribute and those type of things. But the thing that they really could never understand was that the fuel to all of that, the fuel to the growth of Walmart was the culture. It's exactly right. That's you know, that's our competitors never could duplicate that. Right. They tried, they tried by hiring some people that had worked at Walmart before, but it just didn't work because it was it took a lot of people on the same page to you know make that culture work. Right. And our work ethic was pretty good, as you remember. I'm sure we we worked we worked a lot of hours. There was a lot of hours. And and that was you did that because you know, we had one thing that we always kept our eyes on, that was our founder and chairman Sam Bolton. Right. And I got the opportunity to work directly for him for about a year, the first year I was in store planning. Yes. And when I traveled with him and watched how he dealt with the associates, it was like going to school. Right. Because the way he did it, he drew more information from the hourly associates and management than he really ever imparted. Right. And he would take that and roll that together, and you remember the Friday and Saturday morning meters. Yes. His trip consisted, his notes consisted of the things he learned on that particular trip. Right. And so And there were a lot of them. Oh, there were there were a lot of them. Yeah. We laughed this morning and talked about the phone calls the buyers used to get, uh, like you did. And particularly a guy named Wes Phillips, who was a fabric buyer, who got a phone call, I guess, every store Mr. Walton was in. And he would tell Wes, I've got this department manager, very sharp, talk to her on the phone about things she needs, and he'd hand the department manager the phone. So I mean, how how the buyers handled that was tremendous, you know. So what I used to try to do when I'd travel in operations, I used to try to get a hold of the buyer in the DMMs and say, here, here's what I'm finding. Right. And is that an issue everywhere, or is it just an isolated issue? And I think that was the the right way to do it. And instead of springing it on them in a Friday morning management meeting, that was my that was my way of communicating with the buyer issues that we had. Sure. As a buyer, I was a buyer for for many years at Walmart, and I will tell you that I appreciated those kind of calls. You were one. That would do that. Andy Wilson, who most people that tune into doing business in Bentonville are very familiar with, he was a regional that would do that. Some of them would uh you know wait until kind of a gotcha kind of thing on a Friday afternoon in front of you know 500 people and put you on the spot. But you know, I would also tell you as a buyer, you were prepared for that too, because uh, you know, it was part of the culture that Sam Walton created was know your business. Uh you know, if you're the buyer for men's underwear, which I was for several years, you better know that this is because not only are you dealing with the supplier base, but you're the company expert. Yeah. So you may be called to address that uh in front of an audience, uh in front of hundreds of people, you may be called to address that to uh a group of people outside of Walmart. I remember uh the during shareholders week, the um the board members would walk through a uh a Walmart store. And I very vividly recall when Hillary Clinton was on the board of directors at Walmart. She was coming in, and she had a lot of questions uh as she was walking through the menswear area for me. So um yeah, you had to be you had to be the resident expert. So you better understand and you better be on call too. Yeah. Uh and on your game at all times. Yeah. And there were a few times, Mel, when I got a call uh to please come to Mr. Walton's office. Remember Becky Elliott. Hey, John, uh Mr. Walton would like to see you. And one time in particular, um, I was buying men's workware. And uh he had been to Falfurious, Texas. You know that that he loved to go to Falfurious and hunt. Well, Sam Walton would decide he was going to do it. He'd go jump on the plane, take his dogs, and go down there without anything, without packing anything. So he would go to the store and he loved to wear the khaki uh Williamson dicky pants and hit and whatever his size was, I don't remember exactly, but we were out of stock. Uh-oh. So, you know, uh instead of going to my boss, who at the time was Harrietta Bailey, the the first female vice president for Walmart, uh, I got the call. And he didn't look at it as, you know, I want to tear this guy's face off for being an asshole. He looked at it as a moment to teach. Absolutely. Uh, and he approached it as, hey, I'm a customer. You know, I was a customer and I was disappointed. And, you know, I want you to understand that it's your responsibility to make sure that we don't disappoint customers. Like Russ Robertson said last month, you don't have the right as a Walmart associate to disappoint a customer. That's a good point, really is. You know, we uh we still used paper sacks in the late 80s. Right. But we had these nice belted checkouts that would move the merchandise from the back to the front so the checker could scan them. But we still used paper sacks. And Mr. Walton spent about three weeks with me on paper sacks. I was an advocate of paper sacks. Right. And and he let me debate it. That's the way I'd put it. He let me give him why I didn't think we should go to plastic sacks. And on the Friday of the third week, he finally looked at me and said, You don't understand. We're gonna go to plastic sacks in every store in this company, or the person that replaces you will do it. And I said, You're right. I didn't understand. Please let me up out of here, I'll go make this happen. And we made that conversion pretty quickly. But that was a teaching moment. It's okay. Uh heard enough. Go get it done. And that's that's what we did. That was kind of that was kind of our motto in the whole company. We we could discuss things. Right. But once the decision was made, we went executed on those decisions. I'll give you an example. You mentioned Andy Wilson. The first setup I ever went on after I joined Walmart, Andy was the floor assistant back when you you needed to set a floor in a Walmart store in an office before you got a store. And as we grew so fast, that became impossible. Right. Uh, but most people had been on the setup, and Andy was the floor assistant. I really admired the way he handled himself and how classy he was, and how he communicated with the people in the store. He was he was very good at that. So that was my first um meeting with Andy and my experience being around him. But any he ended up being my across the street neighbor for a long time. That's funny how that works. Yeah, it is. But yes, sir, that that's a very good point. Yeah, Andy, Andy's a great guy. Um so I wanted to talk a little bit more about Canada um because I I got the call too. Um, I remember I was a buyer in menswear, and I got a call to come see Brent Berry. Yeah, you know, great, great merchant, uh, really, really good guy. And but I was thinking, why am I getting a call to go talk to Brent Berry? He was at the time a uh DMM in domestics, I believe. That's right, hardware, maybe, maybe hardware. I know he had worked in domestics, but so I go into Brent uh his office and he said, Hey, John, I've got an opportunity if you're interested in it. And he explained, uh, we need you to go to Toronto every week for a year. Uh wants you to handle the men's um boys and infants departments as a DMM, working directly with the Canadian team. And I said, I'm yeah, I'm I'm signed me up. That sounds like a great thing. Yeah. He said, Oh, and by the way, Mel Redmond's the one that's gonna be running that. And I said, That's you know, sign me up for that. That's awesome. The way you guys partnered up with those DMMs that were already there, right, and the buyers for the most part who were already there, and taught them by leading was a real key to that whole operation, is that they had somebody who'd been there done that to watch and follow and and to learn the policy procedure. Right. Because it was very different from what existed at Woolco. Everybody was kind of on their own, what I recall. Right. But you know, they were uh those the Canadian associates really they were so shocked when the company sold. But as we got there, they gravitated to us as a group. And I'll give you an example, they were so scared that you remember Adelaide Street, yeah, and we still had the elevator operators in Adelaide Street. Yeah, I remember Mario one time just about tackled me because I was gonna stop the door from shutting with my hand. He goes, you'll lose your hand if you're not gonna be able to do it. Yeah, because it wasn't it wasn't automatic. But getting on the elevator, you know, at Adelaide Street, that lobby, and then you had two elevators.

SPEAKER_01 29:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

And you get on the elevator with all the Canadian associates and some of our U.S. team, and it was so quiet at first, it was like everybody like in a Manhattan hotel, they'll stand and instead of talking to somebody, they'll stare at the floors like which which one's coming next. Oh, it's two and three. So we got to where we'd say, Good morning, and how you doing? And they had an answer that I really I really liked. Most of them quit saying it, but you'd say, How are you doing? They'd say, Not bad. I said, wait a minute. It's kind of noncommittal, isn't it? I mean, you're not bad, that means you're not good or bad. I don't really get that. So people would catch themselves saying that, which was a very Canadian. Right. And and they'd catch themselves saying it and say, Oh, I'm doing great. So even on the elevator, we were trying to spread the culture. Yeah. And so people were comfortable talking to us. And they got very comfortable talking to us uh and covered a lot of issues with us that we probably wouldn't have known had they not told us about. Right. But I think the atmosphere we created was bring it to me, let me hear your concerns, and then we'll fix it if we can. And and and I think that was something that that was new to the it was. I think if I remember right, I mean, we Walmart bought the old Wolco chain up there, and those stores were um they had cavernous stock rooms. Uh and one of the first assignments that you put us on, the buyers that were up there on the transition team, was go out to some stores and go through the stock rooms and try to put a number on what the inventory was because we hadn't finalized the deal they were doing. It was still the due diligence to try to value that inventory. And we were crawling through stock rooms and finding product that had been packed away maybe five or six years. So, you know, one of the things that they were suffering from is they had a tremendous amount of non-saleable inventory that's clogging up their turnover and everything else. So we came back. I mean, you sent us out, and the first thing I learned uh was the term toe rubbers. And that was a that was a uh uh shoe cover, a rubber shoe cover. You had to have that on there because you were traipsing through snow and heights and everything else. We went to Toronto, by the way, uh in January. In January. So that's the coldest year I've ever experienced. But uh, so we went out to the stores and came back, and you told a story uh a couple of weeks ago. We would come back and we stayed in a hotel in downtown Toronto, and every night you would host a gathering at the at the uh the lounge there. And when it was really cold, we would eat and everything else through. Um, but you told a story that when the buyers came back from that trip, we looked like we had a you said it was a deer and they had lights. We could always tell those of us had been there a while, when new people went out to the stores for the first time. Because to say they were bad is an understatement, they were horrible. And, you know, we one of the things that Brent Berry, who by the way, is one of the smartest guys I ever worked with, and had such a way about him that people gravitated to him. He was a GMM on that job. Yes. And one of the things that he had to do was make sure that we took their uh SKUs from about 38,000 SKUs to almost 90,000 SKUs by setting a regular Walmart modular. But that wasn't that wasn't the issue. The issue was how did we get the vendors to work with us in Canada because a lot of people don't know this? Merchandise, that's one thing. If you got this water bottle, it's got to be English on the front and French on the back. National law. And I learned that the hard way, sending out memos the first week I was there. I'll never forget this gentleman's name, Adolphe O'Chang. I get a phone call. I'd been there probably two weeks, and I'd fired out a bunch of letters of directives and policies, and I get a call from this gentleman, Adolfo Chang, in my office. And I said, yes, uh, Mel Redman, can I help you? And he started explaining to me how many dollars worth of fines I'd racked up by sending out English-only memos. I actually thought it was a friend of mine playing joke on me. And before the conversation was over, I was, yes, sir, no, sir. If you'll give me another chance, Mr. Chang, I'll make sure this is correct. What I just didn't know, part of the learning that you had to do everything bilingually. Right. And a letter or a label or whatever. So that that created a real issue for you guys in the mine division, making sure that vendors understood the compliance and the language on a piece of merchandise. Modular labels had to be in English and French. Right. And every sign had to be in English and French. So yeah, we learned that the hard way. It was it was quite a learned experience. But one things we did, we went out and met with every premier of every province in Canada. Right. And asked them if there was anything that they would like to see us do that wasn't currently being done in retail. And they didn't have a lot of comments. They they appreciated us come coming to their offices and and asking those things. And I think they welcomed us a lot better because of those visits that we had with the premiers. And anyway, that was part of the learning the culture. I had to learn a lot about the Canadian culture. Right. I mean, just a lot about it. And seems like they would be very similar, but there were we discovered a lot of differences that that we needed to be aware of. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, a lot of, and I think one of the best things that we ever did was hire the Canadian PR firm. Right. Yes. Eddie Gould and his group that kind of shepherded us through a lot of those things. Like I learned that I had about 10 nervous ticks when I was on camera. The way I learned that is Ed put me through media school. And it looked like I was giving signals at third base. I mean, I'd I'd touched my ear and wiped my face and rubbed my forehead, and he showed those to me, and I thought, you gotta be kidding me. Well, after a long time, two or three months, I finally got to where I could do an interview without touching my ear or wiping my face. And but we had to learn a lot about it because immediately the people in Canada thought we were here's this big U.S. company coming to Canada and buying our Canadian retail store. Well, there's nothing more U.S. than FW Worth. And right that was one of the things they used to say in interviews was look, we're we're coming here, we're here for a year, we're gonna put a couple hundred million dollars in capital expenditure money circulated in by redoing the stores, and then we're going home. Right. Yeah. You know, it's gonna be run by Canadians, and and all we're doing is is trying to work with them and teach them what we do that they may not have known before. So yeah, it was bridging the gap. And one of my favorite stories is the word of the week. You know, Canadians have very different terminology than we do, so we'd use a word of the week and ask them to define it. It was generally hokey.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

You know, like one day the word of the week was Wang, W-A-N-G. We asked them definition, and finally someone said it's what a burb uses to fly with. And we had a big laugh. And the whole group finally looked forward to the word of the week communication. So like you mentioned, the theme that year uh was you ain't seen nothing yet. So um, you know, in c in Canada it's it's the Queen's English, you know, and it's very proper English. It is. And uh not so much in Arkansas. Um so ain't see nothing yet, and and and misspelling nothing to N-U-T-H-I-N using ain't, but they had gravitated to that. And that became the theme, and uh and they uh they took that and ran with that and and played it in every yeah, we played the song every meeting. In in Canada, you know, this was still during the days when Walmart was having a Saturday morning meeting. And because we were leaving on Friday to go back, we would have a Friday morning meeting in Canada. And that's where we would that's really where you shined uh because you ran those Friday morning meetings very, very uh similar to the way Sam Walton would run a Saturday morning meeting in Bentonville. And it was it was all business, but it was fun. And I remember we we brought in Roberto Alomar, who was with uh with the Toronto Blue Jays, MVP of the Link. Lingual women were screaming, and uh and uh I remember the the first meeting we had, we had a meeting in the summer uh at Faith Hill, a very young and upcoming country western star Faith Hill played. Um, and it was just uh you could see by that time, by the summer, like I said, we went up in January. You can see by the summer this thing was really, really building, and people were really excited. The enthusiasm really kind of rose to the surface during that summer meeting you're talking about. And and of course, having Faith Hill entertained for us. I gotta give Anderson Music credit for that because they went out and and got her. I told them we needed somebody like Garth, and they were like, uh, you you you can't book Garth in two or three months. But Faith had just had a hit, uh, I think it was called the Wild One, was her first hit, and she was fabulous on the stage and played to the audience. She was a really good entertainer. But yeah, that happened, yeah. We had people show up to that meeting, like Doug Flutie, yeah, who had won, I think, his third um Grey Cup. Yeah. Canadian Football League, yeah. But he was he was there, and we had we had a lot of hockey players. Right. A lot of hockey players. Doug Gilmore, I remember, was the big Toronto Maple Leaf store. He came. I got to meet Doug Gilmore, and I have a I still have a Jersey from Doug Gilmore. I do too. I do too. I still have Doug Gilmore in Jersey. But yeah, you know, we just we tried to inject some of the things that got us so excited. Like one day I'm sitting up front before the Saturday morning meeting started, and I'm working my numbers from my division, and I look up and there's Christy Brinkley. Yeah, I went, huh. I looked back down my numbers, looked up, and there was Cindy Crawford. Well, they were pushing swimwear for one of the companies, and you just never knew who's gonna show up. Randy Travis showed up and played us a little mini concert at seven o'clock in the morning. At seven o'clock. Yeah. And Nolan Bryan, and he just never knew who was gonna show up. Right. We had a uh a podcast a year ago. We uh we brought in Arthur Emmanuel, who you remember very well, and Dallas Dobbs, who was a longtime Walmart buyer. Well, he had a discussion about the Saturday morning meeting, and um yeah, that was just that was part of it. You never knew. And and people today would say, oh yeah, but you had to work on Saturday, and and um but you didn't want to miss them. You know, you didn't want to miss those meetings. Yeah, I never thought anything about working on Saturday. Uh, you know, it I knew we were gonna have a meeting. I knew hopefully we had good numbers and we could report on those. And, you know, it was it was really a fun time. Do you remember when Mr. Waltman would get us to sing row, roll, roll your boat in three different groups? Yeah, and he would lead it. And it's like nobody would ever believe that. We in Walmart Saturday morning meeting, we're singing roll, roll, roll your boat. But it was a way of bringing people together too, because we got to laugh at each other. Right. You know, point and go, you're not even singing, man, just moving your lips. Yeah, we used to have a lot of fun. So I think it was important to to bring that to Canada and do it on Friday afternoon because I remember we would um we would do that meeting and then we would go to the airport and come back. You specifically told your team, I don't want to see you at the Saturday morning meeting in Bedonville. That's right. I mean, you threatened us that if you did not show up, you go home and be with your family. Yes, and I remember that very well. But you went to the Saturday morning meeting because they wanted you to report on what's going on in Canada. Yeah. That the the weekends that I came home, there's a lot of weekends that I didn't go home because there's so much I felt like there was so much I needed to do. Right. But when I did go, I went to the Saturday morning meetings. But all of you guys and ladies who are on that transition team were given 110% of yourselves Monday through Friday. You just needed to be home with your kids and your husband or spouse or significant other, didn't make any difference, need to recharge your battery. Right. And that was I think that was important. We we appreciated that. We felt like we were well taken care of. And you mentioned uh Arlene, your assistant, uh Miguera, took great care of us. She, when we first started going up there, and and through a lot of the year, we would some of us have to fly commercial. So she arranged all those airline tickets. In fact, she had a brilliant move. She discovered that if you buy the ticket round trip from Toronto to Bentonville, you could save a lot of money. So we flew up one time, and then from there we would have round trip tickets that would go from Toronto to the Speaker. Very sharp and took everything that she could gather under her wings to make sure that the people that she took care of had what they needed. And she is very good. She's retired now, living in Cave Springs. She was great. I was. I I had I had three good division managers, uh, Dave Burkhart, Doug Bayland, and uh and Harold Eason was with me. So those those guys really, those two guys really kind of held it down. But they would call me. They didn't they didn't dominate my time, but we just felt like the continuity would be better if we just left it intact. And and it it worked very well for us. Um I just uh I'm still always amazed. I've got I think all of us got one. We got a picture of downtown Toronto. Right. A print. Uh-huh. And everybody in the Toronto Home Office signed it. Yes. I've got one of those too. They did. Yeah. I mean It's in my office, right? Yeah, mine too. It's a treasure. It is a treasure. So, yeah, I I just think I said it several times. That was probably the most unbelievable year I've ever spent at Walmart. That and had more fun, learned more, you know. I would have to echo that. We had we basically created a standalone company. Right. And you know, people don't remember this fact that we were international, but we were in Mexico and a couple other countries, but all of a sudden Canada became like one big company running by itself. And to create it a standalone company, we had to we had to really work at it. I don't know if everybody realizes this, but we went in January and we re-grand opened 122 stores in November. Yeah. So they went they full, they went from a old Wolko to a full Walmart store in that short period of time. And I remember, well, we we looked at every single blueprint. The buying team would get together and we'd lay the blueprints out, and we would, and because I was representing men's, boys, and infants, you were all good trying to say, here's the space we need, trying to figure out how to lay it out. And uh Dennis Burke, uh, if you remember, very good guy. Yeah, he kind of was, you know, the the guy that was leading that charge. So that was the one of the first things we did was say, okay, how are we going to divvy the space up? And then we started working on monjas. We rented a um uh old warehouse in the industrial area of Trump. Industrial area, yeah, uh uh curity. We call that his own curity. Uh-huh. And we would we had a shuttle bus that would come to uh the office and just go from the office to the layout room in the old warehouse. It was about a 30-minute drive. And remember, Alex um in the lobby would every now and then go, okay, we've got the bus security. You know, so give you five minutes, you've got to go down if you're gonna want to get on the bus. So we we started the modular process in that old building. Yeah. I remember um we would bring people up that were experts from the U.S. that weren't necessarily on the transition team, right? Would come up for different times to help out one of them, Clifford Young.

unknown 48:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:09

You remember who was leading uh at the time, he was he drove the whole um non-pricing scanning and everything. And uh so he came up and helped. Uh and we had just a lot of different people. And and like you mentioned earlier, it was always fun to see their reaction after they had been up there for the first week. But um, so that was that was kind of how we put everything together. We looked at every single floor point. Right. And you remember uh the first two-story Walmart store was uh Mississauga in Mississauga. Still there, still there. We didn't know what we we had so much space. It was like, okay, well, John, your underwear counters uh normally 36 feet, but here you've got 90 feet of it. So we tried stuff and it did well. Yeah. Big old store still does still does very well. But it was such a great traffic location that I remember when we uh grand opened that store, the mayor of Mississauga, a lady had been in politics for years. We invited her to catch a ribbon. And I was standing on the in the parking lot on the first floor waiting for her, and she drove up in a rush, and I said, Madam Mayor, how are you? And she said, Here, park my clerk. So I I went and parked her car, which come to find out she was used to people doing that for her, so but she did cut the ribbon, we had a lot of we had a lot of great firsts like that, and of course she was fabulous on stage because had been doing that most of her life. Right. But you know, the the the thing the thing that really ties this all together is who Sam Moulton was, right? And what he was about. And he was the culture. He was the culture, created the culture. I remember when we made the decision, and we probably didn't include we obviously didn't include as many people in this as we should have, but when the super centers started coming on, and half of the new stores were super centers, or half of the relocations were relocating from an old Walmart store to a supercenter. And we decided that the super centers needed to be red, gray, and blue because the Walmart stores were snickerdoodle orange and brown for the most part. I remember the first grand opening I took Mr. Walton on to a red, gray, and blue super center. He he went to the store, did his thing. We grand opened, walked outside, he stopped, oh, probably 30 feet from the front door and turned around and looked at the store. And he never called me Mel. He called me Melvin. Yeah, Vin, yeah. Because I asked him to call me Mel, and he said, why? And I said, I do. He said, Oh, if you're down, I'll just call you Mel Vin. So anytime he he called me by name is what he called. But he looked at the store and he said, Mel Vinn, I'm not sure you boys are making the right decision here on this red, gray, and blue store. There's something sacred about that snickerdoodle orange and brown, and man, my heart just fell down to my ankles. I thought, wow, because we had already ordered fixtures and paint. You know, we used to and and inlaid red stripes instead of orange stripes on the floor. We changed the colors of our checkouts to that blue that you you still see. I couldn't get to a phone fast enough to call my boss at the time, Al Miles, and told him what Mr. Walton had said, and Mr. Miles just said in a very calm boy, stick to your guns. Yep. And so we continued to roll them out until one day Mr. Walton called me up on the phone and he said, You guys did the right thing on these colors. And I, that's good. That's good. It couldn't have been bad. That was the great thing about Al Miles. Um, Sam really, really respected Al Miles. And I this is kind of an interesting story. I remember a Saturday morning meeting. Um, you know, the buyer that was buying videos at the time we were doing VHS videos, but the um the movie Dirty Dancing had just come out uh on video. So the buyer was showing a clip of it in the Saturday morning meeting, and it was the clip where they're dancing kind of close together. And the clip ends, and and Sam Walton goes, I don't think we need to sell that in our stores. And the room just went dead. I remember I was looking at my feet, everybody around was looking at their feet, and the buyer was just dying of the microphone. How do you respond? Al Miles sitting up on the stairs, we had a stage banking out to him there. He said, uh, Mr. Walton, I think we can't afford not to have that in our stores. That's sales for us. And uh, he said the movie's not as bad as what that clip looks like. And he goes, I remember Sam goes, okay, Al. If you think we ought to, then we ought to do it. You know, and everybody was just going, wow, you know. Who else would who else would uh stand up and say that? He he had that in him. He he that's why we had to admire him, all of us as a leader. Do you remember when uh Mr. Walter shut Johnny Bench down on his cryline spray paint because he told an off-color story about when he was doing the Wheaties commercial? Oh yeah. And Mr. Walton just looked at him and said, Oh, okay, that's enough. Sit down. And he did. You know, it just he just wouldn't let anybody really get off-color. Right. Right. Or when George Foreman bench pressed Andy Wilson. Do you remember that? George was there in a suit and tie, and he was I feel what Andy was talking about, but he said, I think I can pick you up over my head. And I don't know if they'd practice it or not, but old George just reached down and got Andy by the leg and the chest and bench pressed him over his head. So we had some we had some great times. It was some great times. Well, uh, this has been fantastic. I really, I really think this is great. But one other thing I wanted to say about Walmart, Canada, um, and I'll say this about Walmart International, because Walmart went into other countries too, uh, Germany, Japan, Korea, um, and Europe or uh uh England too. They had the ASDA come. ASDA was successful, but they ended up selling ASDA. But all those other companies, um, the one thing that would not be established or the one thing that caused them not to be as great as Canada is they didn't have the culture. They could never adopt the culture. And I think the difference that that we made in Canada, thanks to your leadership and your push for culture in Canada, made a huge difference. And today, Walmart Canada is by far the biggest retailer in Canada and still growing very strongly. And now they're having they have super centers up there. So there's really there's really not one person that I could single out that's responsible with that. I think one of the things that happened was our team bonded. Right. And it it's not like you and I knew one another before that. I mean, I knew who you were, right? We knew but the people that we put together so quickly bonded and understanding and quickly understanding what we had to do culture-wise and change the thought process from the old Wulko days to the Walmart days. Yeah. And then we put Mr. Walton at the center of that. We had that big portrait of him hanging in the the uh Friday morning, uh Friday uh meeting or auditorium. So what I was looking for. And the quotes that we had around the room literally people adopted those as their own quotes and thought process. So it was it was pretty every one of you on that transition team just did a remarkable job. So that's why I say can't look to one person. It was a such a team effort. Right. It was definitely a team effort, great leadership. Um and uh yeah, I count that as the best year of my team. We I learned a tremendous amount. I was given a tremendous amount of responsibility. Um uh I was counted on for things I had never been counted on before, but the the ability to do those things and grow from that. Now, the only thing I would say that I would criticize the process was when you leave and go on an expat assignment like we did, um, and then it's time to go back, you're almost like, oh, oh, you're back. You know, we we kind of forgot about you. We better figure out a place to put you. So I think over the years, Walmart smoothed that out. This was like one of the first times, and I think it was the first transplanted group of talent, right, that were out there, and everybody, everybody in the company admired what all of you did. But the re-entry part of it wasn't difficult. Yeah. It was, but difficult. Uh I count it as a great experience, and uh I think this has been a fantastic discussion I could go on for hours, and I know you could too. Thank you. There's a lot of memories, and hopefully we can get the group together sometime and be share, share some stories and some memories. But the last thing I'd ask is for you to wrap it up and and maybe tell what the most important thing that you've learned about Walmart and culture and and what you would recommend to anybody that's watching this video today. Well, it it was uh I'll tell you first of all, it was what I was looking for. I didn't know I was looking for it. But the other retail company that I worked with for six, almost seven years just didn't have any personal uh there was no personal relationships. So you you knew who people were, it was a relatively small company, but it just didn't have the charisma that we really most of us wanted. And when we came to Walmart, when I came to Walmart, from the the very first meeting I went to, I was assistant manager, went to U-In meeting in Tantera Lake of the Ozarks, and I got to hear Mr. Walton talk about the future. And he talked about it, so you know, we're gonna open 40 stores next year, and that was a big bite for us at the time. And you know, we're gonna need 40 store managers, and where's that group coming from? Out of this group, assistant manager, and for every 10 stores we open, we've got to have the district manager, and that comes from the manager group, right? And for every 60 stores we open, we've got to have a regional vice president, and that's gonna come from the district manager, and the way he laid it out. I'll never get I turned to my wife and said, This is where I want to be the rest of my life. Right. Because there was a hope in the future and and a vision that I had never seen or shared before until that meeting. And from that point on, that's that's what drove my me as an individual. What what opportunities can come along that I can have the chance to grab at and hopefully do the job. And so, you know, he was just it was just masterful the way he put that together and motivating. And you know, Mr. Walton always carried that yellow legal pad with him. Sometimes it's folded up, yeah, sometimes it's open. And I I looked at it two or three times or hardly anything ridden on. And he'd use that, kind of look at, used it as a prop when all this was coming from you know, his brain, what he what he envisioned. And you know, the other thing I I have to tell you is those of us who traveled with him on his airplane. Yeah. We're we're a unique group because we survived it. I'll tell you, I'll tell you one last Sam Walton story. I was with him up in some ground openings in Indiana, and we're in his old turboprop, and the weather was bad. And so this is for ILS system at Rogers. This was Binville, the chicken house approach and weather. And, you know, we tried to land in Binville, and I had the the book that said Mist Approach, climbed a thousand feet and turned left. And we've tried it three times. And I finally told Mr. Bolton, I said, you know, where are we going to go now? And he said, we can go to Fort Smith and we can land there. It's got a landing system. I said, if it's all the same to you, if you'll let me off in Fort Smith, I'll have my family come get me. And he just couldn't believe it. He he laughed out loud. He said, You're serious, Archie. I said, Yes, sir, I'm this serious. But you know, let me off this airplane, I'll drive home. So, you know, he was pretty cool about that, but I was that scared after three missed approaches. Not him. He was calm as a cucumber. Yeah. But yeah, he's a lot of air miles. Yeah. I'll tell you one last story. I've I know I've run over. I want to tell you about. We went to, Mr. Walton called me up, knowing I was from Northeast Arkansas. He said, we need to go find a new store location for Jonesboro 45, Blibel, and Paraguay. And I said, okay, sir. He said, can you can you go first thing in the morning? I said, I sure can. Well, my mother taught school for 42 years, same little town in Monet, Arkansas. And she would always ask me, Well, you think I could meet Mr. Walton? Do you think I'd ever get to meet him? I said, I don't know. You know, well, I saw a perfect opportunity and expected that we'd probably go to Paragol first. I don't know why I thought that, but that's what I came up with. And so I called my mother and I said, if you'll go to the Paragol store and sit in the snack bar, you know, back when we had the orange mass snack bar, we'll be there. I'm not sure if it'll be first, but we'll be there before noon. And I'll introduce you to Mr. Walton. So we walk in the front door of the Paraguay Walmart store, and there's my mother, a large, gagurious woman with a big smile on her face. And I turned to Mr. Walton, just he and I at that point. Um, and I said, Mr. Walton, would you do me a favor? He said, Sure. I said, Can you shake hands with my mother? And he stopped, kind of put his hands out like that, and said, The woman that raised you is in this door. I said, Yes, sir, sir, that's her sitting in Snagnar. He said, You take the management and go look this door. I'm gonna go meet your mother. So he walks over to her to Snagnar and shook her hand and visited with her for 30 minutes. My mother floated out of the store. So she was so amazed. So that's kind of that's kind of things he did. That's that, you know, didn't cost any money, but it means the world. That was that's a great uh that's a great story. I'll end this. Um I uh I was working in store 894 for Maxi Carpenter in Tulsa, O'Connell. And uh for the grand opening, uh Sam Walton announced that he was gonna come. And so I told my father, who uh was a physician in Tulsa, and he wanted to come to the grand opening. So he wanted to meet Sam Walton, too. So he was very much the same. He he was very cordial and very uh gracious, and and uh it was great for me because the two people that had the most influence on my life were there together. Yeah, my dad and Sam Walton. So it was a great moment for me. Uh it was great. But I gotta tell you, Mel Redmond, this is a great moment for me too, because you were another one of those people that had a great influence on my career. Thank you. And a great influence on a lot of other people's career. And if there's ever a culture champion out there, anybody who could claim to be a culture champion, ladies and gentlemen, it's Mel Redmond. I much appreciate you coming and uh taking part in my podcast. My pleasure, and thank you very much. I appreciate it.