Walmart's 32-year growth

This is pretty fascinating, Consumerist has posted a link to a paper that was written by Thomas Holmes at the U of M, which details Walmart's's growth strategy. Counter-intuitively, he shows that Walmart grew by building stores close to existing stores, NOT by spreading them out as you'd think. Putting them close allowed for economies of scale in distribution, advertising and employee costs making up for any possible cannibalization.