Bentonville

Why Bentonville:

I had a coupon for Allegiant Airlines and was looking for places to go. The best deal I could find was to Northwest Arkansas where conveniently my friends Joe and Alyse lived.

Northwest Arkansas is a collection of towns including Bentonville (the home of Walmart, the company with the largest revenue on earth) and Fayetteville (home of the University of Arkansas). The towns all kind of blend together and there is no single dominant town, so the name Northwest Arkansas is used to describe the metro area. 

I had originally planned for this to be my annual college football trip but it turns out that the Razorbacks play a home game every other year in Little Rock and this was the weekend. Whoops!

August 29, 2024: Walmart-ville

My flight landed at Northwest Arkansas National Airport at 12:30 after a three-hour direct flight from Los Angeles. Alyse and her two-year-old daughter Emmy picked me up and we drove into town. I have many relatives with one-year-olds but I quickly learned that two was a very different experience. Emmy could walk, talk and express opinions but still was not potty trained – all in all a taxing experience for parents. 

We headed straight to downtown Bentonville. Bentonville is the home of Walmart. Sam Walton’s first store, Walton’s 5 & 10 was located in the town square. 

Despite Walmart’s incredible growth into becoming world’s largest company by revenue and largest private employer, it has remained true to its small-town roots. The corporate headquarters are still here, and all the leadership and ownership live in Bentonville. 

To both make their home nice but also to attract talent and vendors, Walmart and the Walton family have and are continuing to invest insane amounts of money into turning Bentonville into the Disneyland of small towns. Look at a Google Street view from even just a decade ago; the Bentonville of today is unrecognizable.   

Because Walmart essentially has free reign over the town, Bentonville has essentially no shops that could compete with Walmart such as grocery stores, furniture stores, or clothing stores. There are a few specialty stores like a high-end bike shop (more on this later), guitar shop and a couple clothing boutiques but the general lack of retail is strange. 

Our first stop was Onyx Coffee, a nationally recognized coffee brewer. The futuristic interior could be a landmark in in any big city around the globe. Since I am not a coffee drinker, I ordered a smoothie and croissant. It was delicious. 

Just behind Onyx is a Walmart Neighborhood Market, their smallest store concept. Designed for urban areas, it is essentially a grocery store. Given that corporate ownership and leadership shops here, this Neighborhood Market is pristine and has nicer fixtures than a typical store. Walmart employees (both corporate and store associates) get 10% off all purchases. 

We then walked over to the Hotel 21c, which is a combination boutique hotel and art museum. It was the first boutique hotel to open in Bentonville and filled a key market niche for suppliers visiting the region to meet with Walmart who wanted something nicer than the Motel 6. The hotel has been a huge hit and now a Hilton will open in downtown Bentonville later this year.   

The town square, which is currently under construction, is home to a Walmart Museum in the original 5 & 10 storefront. 

The Walmart Museum, which I visited on a brief visit to the region in 2011, is also under a massive renovation, but their famed ice cream store has been temporarily relocated to a truck in the square. Walmart has heavily subsidized the ice cream so it only costs $1.20 for a huge scoop (they are probably selling at-cost). For reference, I just paid $7 for a similar-sized gourmet scoop in Los Angeles. 

Once the renovations are complete, the town center will be so beautiful. 

On the south side of the square is Ledger, the world’s first bikeable building. The office building which mostly houses Walmart suppliers and coworking spaces, has exterior ramps so cyclists can ascend all six stories of the building and cycle directly to their office. Walmart and Bentonville have put a huge emphasis on cycling.

It was now almost 15:00 and time to pick up Thea, Joe and Alyse’s eldest daughter. She attends a public charter school which is very highly ranked. The schools in Bentonville are the best in the state. 

We then visited a nearby animal shelter called Best Friends, housed in a GORGEOUS multi-story building. There we played with the cats and kittens including a particularly friendly tabby named Megatron. 

The shelter is committed to becoming no-kill by next year. This is an unbelievable achievement – currently shelters kill 1.5 million animals in the US due to lack of resources or shelter space. 

Then we headed home where Thea gave me a VERY thorough house tour. Coming from California, it is wild that anybody my age can afford a house, but the combination of good wages, plentiful housing stock and space means that most Walmart corporate employees can own a home. The median home price in Bentonville is $476,000 (although it was only $260,000 in 2020) but the nearby towns are much cheaper. In adjacent Rogers, the median home price is $352,000. 

By this time, Joe got home from work. After eating a 17:30 dinner (children), Joe offered to show off some of the latest Walmart technology by delivering out dessert by drone. Unfortunately, their house was just out of the current service area so we instead got the delivery in front of the Walmart headquarters (known as the Home Office). Built in 1971, the windowless single-story brick complex seems unbefitting for the world’s largest company. At the same time, the cheaply constructed complex fits in with Walmart’s corporate value of saving money. 

After a short wait, the drone appeared in the sky. It gently lowered the box of goods using a long extendable rope. Once the box was on the ground, it unclipped, raised the rope and flew away. 

We then drove over to the new Walmart corporate headquarters which is supposed to open next year. Shockingly, top global talent was not so interested in working in a windowless building in Arkansas. The new campus is…gorgeous, fancy, full of greenery and, yes, windowed. Walmart has very publicly stated that they hope for 10% of their workforce to commute by bike. 

One part of the complex is open: the corporate gym aka the Walton Family Whole Health & Fitness. It is essentially a gigantic Equinox and looks and feels like a luxury resort. There are multiple pools, indoor tennis and pickleball courts, weightlifting and cardio areas, rooms for exercise classes, meeting rooms and even a day care. Walmart employees can join for just $24 a month for an individual or $41 for a family. Truly the best deal on the planet.

We then headed home to put the kids to bed at 19:30. Bentonville isn’t much of a late-night town, so we went to bed soon after. 

August 30, 2024: Deploying the Walton Capital 

Having seen the town square, it was now time to visit some of Bentonville’s other attractions. 

Alyse took me to the Coler Mountain Bike Preserve a mile out of town. This is a park specifically for mountain biking. The park has 17 miles of trails that are ranked, like ski runs, from Green to Double Black. The trails are immaculately maintained and there are insanely nice capital improvements such as fancy wooden bridges, banked turns and jumps. 

You may be asking yourself, why Bentonville? Unsurprisingly, it is because of the Walton family: specifically, Sam Walton’s grandsons Stuert and Tom Walton. Due to the passion for cycling and mountain biking (MTB), the Walton Family Foundation donated $74 million (as of 2018 so the 2024 number is certainly wayyy more) to help build out Bentonville’s mountain biking trail network. They also have helped the NW Arkansas towns build cycling lanes and bike paths to help cyclists get to the MTB trails. There are now 550 miles of bike lanes, bike paths and trails in NW Arkansas with more to come so that Walmart can hit its 10% cycling commute goal. Bentonville proudly calls itself the Mountain Biking Capital of the World and the city draws tourists specifically for MTB. 

In the center of the Coler Preserve is Airship Coffee, a futuristic coffee shop seemingly built into the hill. It is only accessible by walking and has a similar energy/menu to Onyx. 

Next, we visited the Museum of Native American History. The free museum is the private collection of a single owner who is shockingly not part of the Walton family. The museum contains the best Native American art and artifact collection I have ever seen including every type and age of arrowhead and Plains Indian headdresses. There were also numerous artifacts both modern and historic from Osage tribe which calls this area is historic homeland. While NW Arkansas seems like a random location for this type of collection, Oklahoma, the forced home of many Native tribes, is just 40 minutes to the west. 

Our final museum for the day was the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The museum is unsurprisingly brought to you by the Walton family, specifically Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton. Alice donated approximately $325 million of art from personal collection, the Walton Family donated 120 acres of land near downtown Bentonville and the Walton Family Foundation donated $800 million to start the museum.  The Moishe Safdie-designed campus opened in 2011. Like all the museums in NW Arkansas, admission is free. 

Since opening, Crystal Bridges has risen in prominence to become one of the most well impressive art museums in the country. But good is not enough, they are currently building out new gallery spaces to nearly double the size of the museum.

Alyse, Emmy and I started our visit by eating lunch in the cafeteria. 

We then toured the permanent collection which seems to have (on display) one piece from every relevant American artist in history. If you can name them and they are American, then there is probably a piece of theirs in Crystal Bridges. 

Some of the notable pieces include a Gilbert Peale portrait of George Washington, a Robert Louis Stevenson portrait by John Singer Sargent, Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter, and two Yayoi Kusama installations (she is not American but lived in New York for more than a decade). 

Outside in the grounds are a Frank Lloyd Wright house transported from New Jersey. 

The museum is (sorry to overuse this word) gorgeous. The one thing that caught me off guard was the progressive bend of the curation. Much of the exhibit text was…well…unexpected for Arkansas. Additionally, all the text was written in English and Spanish. 

For dinner, Joe, Alyse, Thea, Emmy and I went to Wright’s, a Texas-style local BBQ chain. It was founded by Jordan Wright, an executive at Tyson Foods (the world’s second largest processor of chicken, pork and beef and the region’s other major company). After taking a work trip to Austin, Texas, he was determined to fill the BBQ niche in NW Arkansas. He started with a food truck but now he has four locations (including one in Little Rock). 

We went to the Bentonville location and waited 30 minutes in line to order. Based on Joe’s recommendation, I got a two-meat plate with brisket, burnt ends, mac & cheese and bbq beans. While I am personally not a fan of Texas-style BBQ, Wright’s was amazing. 

This is now the third unbelievable BBQ place I have visited in Arkansas (Jones in Mariana and McClard’s in Hot Springs). While it does not have its own unique style of BBQ, Arkansas is located right in the middle of three of America’s BBQ hotbeds: Texas, Memphis and Kansas City. Therefore, it should be no surprise that Arkansas has some of the country’s best smoked meats. 

The next day, we headed out on a day trip to Eureka Springs.

Final Thoughts:

While Northwest Arkansas sounds like a small-town backwater, the area has a lot going on. The metro area has 600,000 residents and is among the fastest growing regions of the country in terms of both population and GDP.

Because of Walmart (and to a lesser extent Tyson Foods and the University of Arkansas), there is a lot of money in the area. Walmart and the Walton Family have invested insane amounts (billions) into making Northwest Arkansas a nice place to live and an attractive place for both potential Walmart talent and vendors. The only other American city with a similar level of investment is Aspen, Colorado. 

Walmart’s global reach and diverse talent base has made the region far more diverse than the rest of the state and region. For example, Bentonville has one of the highest percentages of Indians in the entire US. Therefore, NW Arkansas does not feel like “The South” but rather a more generic suburban America. To be fair, it is the extreme northwestern corner of the Southeast.

There are a few oddities about the region. Nearly every attraction is free or heavily subsidized. Also, there are virtually no other retail shops that compete with Walmart which gives the town a unique energy because shopping is such an integral part of most American cities. 

Working for Walmart and living in Bentonville seems like a great choice if you are raising kids. So much of your life is subsidized, the salaries are supposedly above market, the cost of living is low and the schools are good. Additionally, since most everybody is here from somewhere else and works for the same company (which is super profitable), it seems like an easier place to make friends. If you are single, Bentonville might not be as fun since things seem to close early. There is nightlife in Fayetteville, but it’s a college town and based around students, not professionals.

The current biggest downside of the region is the airport. Because Northwest Arkansas is such a business hub (with some routes subsidized by Walmart), flight prices are unbelievably high. XNA is constantly rated one of if not the most expensive airport to fly in/out of in the United States. I was able to fly on the budget carrier Allegiant, however had I wanted to fly not on a Thursday-Sunday, the nonstop flights on American average $584 but were going for around $825 during this fall. This is more than the price to fly from LA to Tokyo. If Northwest Arkansas wants tourism (which it does not really need), this will have to change. 

NW Arkansas and Bentonville are still in growth mode, so the final “product” is still at least a few years away. I cannot wait to return to the region to see all the changes…and to finally catch that Razorback game.