before you shop at walmart again, read this article at fastcompany.com and give it some thought.
this quote is a bit disturbing -- "Last year, 7.5 cents of every dollar spent in any store in the United States (other than auto-parts stores) went to the retailer."
in the computer world, the trend has been one of decentralization -- moving data among smaller nodes so that if one fails, the system still runs.
walmart is a mainframe.