
When it comes to companies, it can be hard to get a feel for their size. They may say they’re “big,” but what does that actually mean? Consider Walmart (WMT), for example. This year, for the seventh time in the past decade, Fortune magazine awarded the retailer the No. 1 slot on its annual list of the 500 largest American companies, as measured by revenues (total earnings before subtracting out expenses).
But how big is Walmart really? The numbers provided by Fortune are so insanely large that they’re hard to wrap your head around in the abstract. So I did a little digging and came up with some pretty stunning comparisons.
According to Fortune, Walmart sold $421,849,000,000 worth of stuff last year. The largest purchase most of us will ever make is our house: If all Walmart sold were new homes, which averaged $268,900 in April, that would be almost 1.59 million homes.
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