Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, did achieve his own American Dream as he came from an area in Oklahoma where "people were cheap." The same thing occurred to the world famous rapper and producer, Jay-Z, rising from a "Marcy kid no one ever noticed before, in the middle of the crowd, rhyming..." Both Walton and Jay-Z are similar in a way that they barely survived in economic condition that each family had to struggle in the past, but then they made their way through success with stood-out talents and opportunities.
In Packer's article "Mr. Sam: Sam Walton," taken from The Unwinding: An Inner Story of The New America, he describes Walton as someone who's willing to keep on growing and working. He had this cautious attitude toward money, which was the way he was brought up; he was just plain cheap. Regarding parents' role in the two men's childhood, Jay-Z's parents had a million records stacked in the milk crates, as Packer claims in another article titled "Just Business: Jay-Z." Shawn would sang and spun around the room with his sisters singing backup while listening to the music.
As they grew up, Packer states that the two men started to show their interests in different areas that lead them toward their career when they became big. Living in a tough suburban area made things tight for Shawn when he was a kid, but he never loses his passion in rhyming. He wrote them down in a spiral notebook until they filled up. "It gave me an unbelievable rush to play it [recorded rhyming] back, to hear that voice," as he recalled. Sam Walton also found out pretty young that he could sell things. He started off in high school by delivering newspapers and selling subscriptions door-to-door, working in J.C Penney retail store, until he started to buy franchise goods. He would wander over and spend hours studying how the competition did things, which then became his lifelong habit.
The places that Sam Walton and Jay-Z originated from played a big role in each person's success in becoming few of the richest men in America. Packer argues in his article that Walton had seen people in his area struggled to fulfill their daily needs that he tried to buy low, sell cheap, high volume, and fast turn. "He [Walton] was so cheap that he kept the sign to as few letters as possible: the new store was called 'Wal-Mart.' It promised 'everyday low prices.'" On the other hand, Jay-Z spent years on the streets that took him further away from the notebooks, so he learned to memorize longer rhymes without writing them down. He was trying to live to the limit. The hardships that he experienced from meeting new people and trying to prove his skills had brought him 'selfishness,' that others called materialist; in fact, that was a rational to the reality he faced.
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