The Crazy Leaps You Remember
Phil Green, a Walmart employee, once took a leap that could have gotten him fired.
He built a pyramid of detergent boxes that ran twelve to eighteen cases high—all the way to the ceiling—and stretched 75 to 100 feet long across the back of the store. It was so massive you could barely get past it. "We really thought old Phil had completely gone over the dam," Sam Walton later said.
When Walton saw it, he came down and asked, "Why did you buy so much? You can't sell all of this!" Most companies would have fired Phil for a stunt like that. But Walmart always felt they had to try some of this crazy stuff. And the gamble paid off. The display was so big it made the news. Everybody came to look at it. And it was all gone in a week. "Mr. Sam usually let me do whatever I wanted on these promotions," Green said, "because he figured I wasn't going to screw it up." Over the years, Green had so much fun with these crazy experiments. "It really is amazing how much merchandise you can move with just a little promotion," he explained. Real merchants, he said, are like real fishermen—they have a special place in their memories for a few of the big ones.
The soap pyramid was one of those big ones. A crazy leap that could have ended badly but instead became the kind of bold move you remember forever.