How Walmart Turned Bentonville, Arkansas Into A Boomtown

Walmart’s hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas has become a surprising boomtown with many amenities you might expect to find in New York, Austin or San Francisco – fancy restaurants, expensive craft cocktails, beautiful biking and running paths, a world-class art museum and a soon-to-open medical school. The town has more cranes per capita than any other U.S. city, with the biggest project being Walmart’s 350-acre new headquarters. The area population increases by 36 people every day and Bentonville is expected to swell to 200,000 by 2050, about 3.5 times today’s population. Bentonville will soon get another wave of newcomers as Walmart transfers many of its corporate employees from other cities. But with the boom comes big-city economic challenges, including a fast-moving housing market with low inventory and high prices. CNBC’s Melissa Repko travels to Bentonville to find out how Walmart has transformed its hometown.

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
2:21 Moving to Bentonville
4:57 Boomtown

Produced and shot by: Shawn Baldwin
Edited by: Andrea Miller
Reporter: Melissa Repko
Supervising Producer: Jeniece Pettitt
Additional Production: Jodi Gralnick, Marc Ganley

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How Walmart Turned Bentonville, Arkansas Into A Boomtown