What's Selling in America: part 2 of 5.

"How Does a 900-Pound Gorilla Get to Be an 1,800-Pound Gorilla?"

Dear Wal-Mart: Was it something I said? You don't call, you don't write -- and you give me the brush-off when I call you. Too bad, because more than a few of us are eager to hear your answer to one of the business world's most intriguing questions: How does the world's biggest retailer plan to get bigger -- much bigger?

Entering your fifth decade, you have bulked up to become a world-dominating behemoth that Sam Walton himself would hardly recognize. With 1.3 million employees and more than $218 billion in sales, you are bigger than the next three largest retailers combined. And now word at the mall has it that you aim to double in size in the next five years, growing at the rate of one Sears Corp. per year. One of your spokesmen, Tom Williams, politely but emphatically told me that 100% growth over five years is not a goal. Or is it? In a recent speech at Portland State University, your vice president of international marketing, Julie Lyle, boasted that it won't be long -- maybe five to seven years -- before your revenue outside the United States is greater than your volume inside the United States. Assuming that you continue to match your current U.S. sales growth of about 15% per year, and that in five years, international sales hit the current U.S. level of $180 billion, you'll be a $542 billion Goliath.

Knowing your executives' penchant for sometimes overstating their stretch goals, I called a guy named Ira Kalish and asked him what you'd look like in, say, three years. Kalish is the chief economist for Retail Forward Inc., a consulting group that specializes in retail-intelligence gathering. He's spent more than a decade analyzing selling trends around the world, and he recently put together an amazingly detailed report called "The Age of Wal-Mart." He says that it's not unreasonable to expect that by 2006, you will likely rack up annual revenue somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion, "an unimaginable number by any standard." You will dominate, by far, the largest chunk of the food business in the country. "For suppliers," adds Kalish, "Wal-Mart will be a country unto itself -- a large one."

All of which gets back to my original question: How does a 900-pound gorilla get to be an 1,800-pound gorilla? Part of Kalish's answer to that question is pretty conventional. He expects you'll ramp up your Neighborhood Markets stores, which let consumers engage in fill-in shopping trips between less-frequent trips to your Supercenters. You will continue to saturate markets with various formats, as you have done in Oklahoma City, where you've spaced Supercenters just five miles apart -- and dropped Neighborhood Markets two miles from each of the oversized stores. And you will experiment with placing big boxes in big cities: You've already chosen Dallas as the first site for a new urban Supercenter. New York's outer boroughs (Brooklyn or Queens) could be next.

But Kalish is also convinced that you've got a radical new strategy up your sleeve: You're going to get bigger by thinking outside the original big box. He says that you'll make a bid to expand at the very edge of your core business, by rolling out new categories such as financial services (banking and brokerage) and home-improvement merchandise. Fill it up at Wal-Mart! You're already well on your way to launching 1,000 gas stations at store parking lots. Predicts Kalish: "Ultimately, Wal-Mart will seek to test the outer boundaries of what consumers are willing to let Wal-Mart be."

Wal-Mart goes for the fringe -- now there's a concept that I had to see for myself. So I booked a flight to Houston, arrived in a rainstorm of biblical proportions, and drove down the Sam Houston Parkway to Pasadena, a suburb on the city's southeastern edge. I quickly found myself in a maxed-out version of mall land, where a Murderer's Row of cavernous emporiums -- Kohl's, Lowe's, Target, OfficeMax, Best Buy, the Home Depot, and, of course, Wal-Mart -- dominated the blacktopped prairie. This Wal-Mart was pretty much your standard-issue box. Inside was the usual vast array of stuff, piled to the rafters: computerized telescopes, Schwinn bikes, Weathersby hunting rifles, yoga starter packs, tropical fish, 14-karat stud earrings, white toilet seats. But there, over on the east side of the parking lot, was an item that 99% of Wal-Mart customers have not yet put on their shopping lists: used cars. That's why I had come to Houston: This car-crazy megalopolis is a perfect laboratory for testing your used-car initiative.