Walmart in the context of "Megastore"

Big business involves large-scale corporate-controlled financial or business activities. As a term, it describes activities that run from "huge transactions" to the more general "doing big things". In corporate jargon, the concept is commonly known as enterprise, or activities involving enterprise customers.

The concept first rose in a symbolic sense after 1880 in connection with the combination movement that began in American business at that time. Some examples of American corporations that fall into the category of "big business" as of 2015 are ExxonMobil, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, Apple, General Electric, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs; in the United States, big businesses in general are sometimes collectively pejoratively called "corporate America". The largest German corporations as of 2012 included Daimler AG, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, and Deutsche Bank. SAP is Germany's largest software company. Among the largest companies in the United Kingdom as of 2012 are HSBC, Barclays, WPP plc, and BP. The latter half of the 19th century saw more technological advances and corporate growth in additional sectors, such as petroleum, machinery, chemicals, and electrical equipment (see Second Industrial Revolution).

The Fortune 1000 are the 1,000 largest American companies ranked by revenues, as compiled by the American business magazine Fortune. It only includes companies which are incorporated or authorized to do business in the United States, and for which revenues are publicly available (regardless of whether they are public companies listed on a stock market). The Fortune 500 is the subset of the list that is its 500 largest companies.

The list draws the attention of business readers seeking to learn the influential players in the American economy and prospective sales targets, as these companies tend to have large budgets and staff needs. Walmart was number one on the list for five of the seven years from 2007 to 2014, interrupted only by ExxonMobil in 2009 and 2012.

A big-box store, a hyperstore, a supercenter, a superstore, or a megastore is a physically large retail establishment, usually part of a chain of stores. The term sometimes also refers, by extension, to the company that operates the store. The term "big-box" references the typical appearance of buildings occupied by such stores.

Commercially, big-box stores can be broken down into two categories: general merchandise (examples include Walmart and Target) and specialty stores (such as Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, IKEA or Best Buy), which specialize in goods within a specific range, such as hardware, books, furniture or consumer electronics, respectively. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, many traditional retailers and supermarket chains that typically operate in smaller buildings, such as Tesco and Praktiker (the latter which is defunct since 2014), opened stores in the big-box-store format in an effort to compete with big-box chains, which are expanding internationally as their home markets reach maturity.

Arkansas (/ˈɑːrkənsɔː/ AR-kən-saw) is a landlocked state in the West South Central region of the Southern United States. It borders Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, Texas to the southwest, and Oklahoma to the west. Its name derives from the Osage language, and refers to their relatives, the Quapaw people. The state's diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the densely forested land in the south known as the Arkansas Timberlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta.

Previously part of French Louisiana and the Louisiana Purchase, the Territory of Arkansas was admitted to the Union as the 25th state on June 15, 1836. Much of the Delta had been developed for cotton plantations, and landowners there largely depended on enslaved African Americans' labor. In 1861, Arkansas seceded from the United States and joined the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. On returning to the Union in 1868, Arkansas continued to suffer economically, due to its overreliance on the large-scale plantation economy. Cotton remained the leading commodity crop, and the cotton market declined. Because farmers and businessmen did not diversify and there was little industrial investment, the state fell behind in economic opportunity. In the late 19th century, the state instituted various Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise and segregate the African-American population. White interests dominated Arkansas's politics, with disenfranchisement of African Americans and refusal to reapportion the legislature; only after the federal legislation passed were more African Americans able to vote. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Arkansas and particularly Little Rock were major battlegrounds for efforts to integrate schools. Following World War II in the 1940s, Arkansas began to diversify its economy and see prosperity. During the 1960s, the state became the base of the Walmart corporation, the world's largest company by revenue, headquartered in Bentonville.

The retail apocalypse refers to the closing of numerous brick-and-mortar retail stores in the Western world, especially those of large chains, starting in the 2010s and accelerating due to the mandatory closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2017 alone, more than 12,000 physical stores closed. The reasons included debt and bankruptcy in the face of rising costs, leveraged buyouts, low quarterly profits outside holiday binge spending, delayed effects of the Great Recession, and changes in spending habits. American consumers have shifted their purchasing habits due to various factors, including experience spending versus material goods and homes, casual fashion in relaxed dress codes, as well as the rise of e-commerce and particularly juggernaut companies such as Amazon.com and Walmart. A 2017 Business Insider report dubbed this phenomenon the "Amazon effect" and calculated that Amazon.com was generating more than half of retail-sales growth.

Asda Stores Limited (/ˈæzdə/), trading as Asda and often styled as ASDA, is a British supermarket and petrol station chain. Its headquarters is in Leeds, England. The company was incorporated as Associated Dairies and Farm Stores in 1949. It expanded into Southern England during the 1970s and 1980s, and acquired Allied Carpets, 61 large Gateway Supermarkets and other businesses, such as MFI. It sold these acquisitions during the 1990s to concentrate on the supermarkets. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange until 1999 when it was acquired by Walmart for £6.7 billion. Asda was the second-largest supermarket chain in the United Kingdom between 2003 and 2014 by market share, at which point it fell into third place. As of January 2025 its market share in the UK is 12.6 per cent.

Besides its core supermarkets, the company also acts as a white label payment card provider offering assistance for insurance and payment services under the Asda Money brand and also has a mobile virtual network operator.

Funai Electric Co., Ltd. (船井電機株式会社, Funai Denki Kabushiki Gaisha) is a Japanese consumer electronics company headquartered in Daitō, Osaka. Currently, it is in liquidation. Apart from producing its own branded electronic products, it was also an OEM providing assembled televisions and video players/recorders to major corporations such as Sharp, Toshiba, Denon, and others. Funai supplies inkjet printer hardware technology to Dell and Lexmark, and produces printers under the Kodak name.

Its United States–based subsidiary Funai Corporation, Inc., based in Torrance, California, markets Funai products in the US, along with Funai-licensed brands including Philips, Magnavox, Emerson Radio, and Sanyo. Funai is the main supplier of electronics to Walmart and Sam's Club stores in the US, with production output in excess of 2 million flat-panel televisions during the summertime per year for Black Friday sale.

A chain store or retail chain is a retail outlet in which several locations share a brand, central management and standardized business practices. They have come to dominate many retail markets, dining markets, and service categories in many parts of the world. A franchise retail establishment is one form of a chain store. In 2005, the world's largest retail chain, Walmart, became the world's largest corporation based on gross sales.