How to Get Rich Starting at Walmart Like My Cousin Did

Everyone should want to be like my cousin. It's a message he's been preaching since he used to prank his brother for wanting to be like him. Now, I don't want anyone getting the wrong impression that he doesn't love his brother because he will call people four-letter names for talking about his brother the way he talks about him. That, however, is a different story.

My cousin is a devout capitalist. He's even memorized some quotes so he can pop off something Hayek or von Mises might have said. In fact, based on some of his more recent thoughts, I'm thinking he may even be up to the 1950s and learning some Ayn Rand stuff. These quotes always come in handy for him when he argues that money is more valuable than human life. How is anybody supposed to argue with dead people who are being channeled through someone who knows their quotes?

Anyway, my cousin has done quite well for himself, and he is barely more than half my age! I asked him what his secret was for his success at such a young age, and this is what he told me:

After considering all the options open to him, he decided to start on the bottom rung of the ladder with Walmart, the world's largest employer in those days. He was hired into the auto parts department, and he worked hard learning the correct way to do things like putting oil filters on the shelves while keeping rotation in mind. 

Sure, there were those moments when he felt like giving up, but after a year or so all his hard work paid off with his supervisor's recognition and request for him to participate in conveying messages that were critical to the auto department's continued smooth operation. Indeed, it was a special day for him when the guy in charge said, "Hey kid, nice job putting those headlights on the shelf. Tell Pete I'm going to lunch and he's in charge."

All it took was that bit of motivation for my cousin to dedicate his working life to making the richest family in the world even richer! Capitalism was working! Soon all the supervisors were noticing his work with comments like, "Hey kid, nice job putting the windshield washer on the shelf," and "Hey kid, nice job putting the Turtle Wax on the shelf."

He climbed so high in the auto parts department in the short ten years that he was there, that when they opened the new store and needed 600 employees, he ended up being one of the twenty assistant managers on the daytime shift! They put him on a salary that would be twice the minimum wage except for the unpaid overtime that was necessary to meet the duties of the job! 

He was climbing in the corporate world of Walmart!

Within a couple of years, he was doing the training at the store from the proprietary Walmart supervisory training manual on how to motivate people without paying them. I don't want him to get in trouble, but he told me that he leads the training with things like asking a supervisor to name a product and use it in a motivational sentence. They would say things like, "Lays potato chips; hey kid, nice job putting the Lays potato chips on the shelf." He was then trained to say "nice job" to the supervisors-in-training.

Then he told me he would go on with the next lesson about making the employees feel doubly important without paying them by having them tell the assistant who replaces the supervisor on lunch breaks that the boss has gone to lunch.

However, after a dozen years with the world's largest employer, and having climbed the ranks such that he had the authority to call for things like another checker when the line was more than a half hour long, and wet clean ups despite never training in grocery, he felt he had reached the heights he had dreamt of when he first decided that Walmart would be where he worked when they asked him that magical question all those years ago: "Can you start on Tuesday?"

He had a house, a nice car, a lifted 4x4 pickup, a couple of Harleys, some classic car projects, and a pallet of cinder blocks in case a few more of those came along. He told me he felt there just had to be more to life. Then he saw this matchbook at the off-road club meeting. All he had to do was draw the caricature of a donkey and send it to them, and they would evaluate his talents to let him know what they think of his artistic abilities. 

Sure enough, they got back in touch with him and told him he should become a tattoo artist! To make it even better, they happened to run a school to teach him about it! Even that wasn't all of it: by signing up within twenty minutes of receiving the letter, he got half of the $2,999 price knocked off!

I was a bit skeptical, but when he showed me the coloring book he had been working on, I was impressed. I was even more impressed when I learned he had to draw his own lines to color in! He said he had not seen projections for an industry since the ones he saw in a magazine he had from the '90s called Dot Com Today. 

The salesman at the school showed him how much money there was to be made in the industry over the next ten years if the percentage of people getting tattoos continues on the same trend. My cousin ran it out another ten years past what the salesman showed him, and by then more than 100% of the people will be getting tattoos! He was going to get in on the boom early!

I respect my cousin for his hard work and upward movement in a company that limits its employment opportunities to only those who will work for them. I admire him for his dedication to learning quotes by dead people regarding economics. I even acknowledge that all of that is topped with him grabbing an opportunity to earn big money by getting into the gold rush of tattoo artistry before the other half of the population does. Still, I had to ask him about something that he wasn't disclosing.

I asked him, "Didn't you get a settlement when you were a teenager?"

He confessed that he had received a hefty six-figure settlement when he was injured at a mercenary camp for teenagers. It was being run by a local paramilitary organization that his maternal grandfather (no relation to me) belongs to. It seems that one of the trainers fired a rubber bullet into the ground, and the ricochet shattered his left testicle into a million pieces. 

It was touch and go at first, but, with his dedication, it was soon touch and come, if you know what I mean - and regularly at that! The only lasting physical consequence besides going through life with half a nutsack was that his penis quit growing before he left puberty. He had that covered with a couple of Harleys and a lifted 4x4 pickup now! 

Besides, he assured me, he still had some of that settlement money left. Then he went on to tell me that he was learning about equity on a balance sheet, or, as he called it, net worth. He's a cute kid.

So, all you need to do is find a way to get a quarter-million-dollar settlement for having your left nut shattered, and you, too, can get rich starting at Walmart like my cousin did!