Analysis of Sam Walton and Jay Z

Analysis of Sam Walton and Jay Z

George Packer’s analysis of Sam Walton and Jay Z

Instructions:-

Compare and contrast George Packer’s analysis of Sam Walton and Jay Z

a) How are they different, and how are they the same? Be specific about their lives.
b) Do you think the ‘American Dream’ is still viable today, and what does it take for the average person to achieve it?
c) What does the ‘American Dream’ mean to you?

Solution

Compare and contrast George Packer’s analysis of Sam Walton and Jay Z

Sam Walton and Jay Z, two American dreamers with lot aspirations for success and money. They both came from a lower class family and build their way up. Both show a lot of similar qualities and way of thinking in their lives. They give and show different life experience they had through their journey for fame and money. Clearly, hard work, brains, initiative, and a bit of good luck can pay off handsomely, but—as in the profiles here—a darker motif often surfaces in American narratives of extreme wealth and fame.

Sam Walton grew up in a pretty bad time. Walton’s father was ever much of a success. His parents would fight and argue all the time. Jay Z father was a clerk, Adnis Reeves, a preacher’s son. His Father after eleven years, teaching his boy how to walk fast through the hood and sharing all the father son moments with him, and then disappeared and never came back. This made Jay Z very depressed and he would never get himself attached to something and have it taken away. He never wanted to feel that pain again and never want anyone else break his heart.

Walton was a very good speaker, and would attract people to his side very easily. He later found out at a pretty young age that he could be a good seller. He worked his way through high school and college delivering newspapers, and he won a contest selling subscriptions door-to-door. He later tried retail jobs like JC Penny, and it lasted long enough for Sam to learn that if employees were called “associates,” they gained a sense of pride in the company. He also spent three year in the army, but when he got out he wanted to get back on retail business.

Jay Z on the other hand loved fame. His family loved music and would have a million records stacked in milk crates. Living on Mercy houses, wasn’t as bad for Jay Z. It was quite an adventure for him; Dice games on the concrete, football in fields strewn with glass, junkies nodding off on benches. Inspired by a Mercy kid, Jay Z started writing rhymes in a spiral book. It slowly took over his life; he would just keep writing and thinking of rhymes the whole day. When crack came up in 1985, it took over Mercy and brought coke out of bathrooms and hallways into public view, turned adults into fiends, kids into hustlers, made parents fear their children. Jay Z saw this as an opportunity. He and his other friend got into drug dealing, and made a lot of money from it.

At this point Jay Z and Walton both were at the early stages on getting started with their dreams. Jay’s dream now was to be a rich guy in a nice car with the big gun. Whereas Walton had a dream of starting a retail store and he bought ben franklin with the help of his father in law. He would spend hours studying his competitors and he came up with his own strategy of Buy low, sell cheap, high volume, fast turn and in fine years he tripled his sales. Jay Z used the same strategy in his business as well. However the crack game didn’t end up his love for rap. Jay Z switched over to Big Daddy Kane, a legendary Brooklyn rapper with a bus tour. His verbal cleverness, his confidence, and high speed rhyming amazed everyone who heard Jay. After jay came back his hustle expanded even more. Which bought a lot of enemies and life threat as well. And gave up on hustling for crack and now he started his hustle in rap industry.

On July 2, 1962, Walton opened his first independent store in Arkansas. This store promised huge discounts and selling everything from clothes to auto parts. He named this store after his last name “Wal-Mart”. In seven years he had 32 stores in four states. And by 1980 there were 276 stores and sales passed $1billion. Even though making billions of dollars he was so cheap that he would still get a $5 haircut in downtown. He and his company gave nothing to charity, and give minimal wages to workers. But every year each branch of his company would hand out a thousand dollar college scholarship to a local high school senior, and that would get more publicity than giving charity. On the other hand Jay tried his luck with different labels, but none of them would want him because he was too real and crafty. So he went ahead and started his own label, Roc-A-Fella. He worked on this and selling tapes with complete dedication. And it turned out a lot of people enjoyed his rap. He got crazy fans trying to be him and copy whatever Jay Z does; his style, his fashion etc. Soon he started various other stores like his own clothing line, his own movie studio, his own Reebok sneaker, distributed his own vodka, put out his own cologne etc. This brought him money from all the corners, and he became richer day by day.

In these two stories, both Jay Z and Sam Walton hustled harder to achieve their goals. They faced their own difficulties and tried to over come them. Even though they both were cheap in their own ways, they still wanted to be billionaires. Sam Walton made money by saving them from not giving enough wages and aids to his workers. And Jay Z just took advantage of the love of his fans gave him, and made them basically spend their money on him.

One unique trait that both these men had that is not common in many people is the ability to forgo current happiness, like attending parties or spending time with family, to build something that will be bigger than their individual image. As a result, both men are marked as obtaining the American Dream because they rose from nothing to building multi-million-dollar companies.

Works Cited

Packer, G. (2013). The Unwinding: Thirty Years of American Decline. Faber & Faber.

Packer, G. (2014). The unwinding: An inner history of the New America. Macmillan.

Trimble, Vance H. Sam Walton: The inside story of America’s richest man. Signet, 1991.

Walton, Sam, and John Huey. Sam Walton, made in America: my story. Bantam, 1993.

White, Miles. From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, rap, and the performance of masculinity. University of Illinois Press, 2011.

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