Wally World at Woodland, PA

The noise is almost deafening. You are in the middle of traffic. Heavy traffic. Its participants: Brown, boxy, blocky, and not aerodynamic at all. Worse: Without drivers and wheels, miraculously moving.

Below the small bridge that you are standing on; conveyor belts with thousands of cardboard boxes, rushing to their bar-code-destined terminus.

You are at the heart of the global number one retailer, its logistics. At a Wal-Mart distribution center, somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania.

This giant windowless hall caters to more than fifty stores within a radius of two-hundred miles. Thirty-five million worth of inventory are amassed here at any given time. One small facility among seventy-plus distribution centers in the States. This dense network has led to the fact that virtually no American is more than sixty miles away from the nearest Wal-Mart store.

The “tour guide” overwhelms you with figures illustrating the infrastructure of the world’s second biggest company. But also his words dazzle you.
He seems to speak in a different tongue. FRID, RTV, DA, No-Con, Pick-at-light, Pick-to-light, Breakpack, etc. The supply chain language.

The towering racks, the flotilla of fork lifters and the millions of packages make it clear what power crushed the backbone of uncountable American small-town shops. What competitive advantage enabled Sam Walton to restructure the US retail market.
Hundreds of trucks are loaded and unloaded every day, feeding the consumer’s unending hunger ranging from enormous plasma TV sets to headache pills. But only a few workers are visible. The continuous flow of goods is controlled by ghost hand, it seems. The associates, many with tattoos and Steelers shirts, are a part of the machine themselves. Each ten-hour shift includes unpacking, packing, loading or labeling thousands of boxes.

No daylight enters the huge steel structure, making daytime and weather irrelevant for the workers inside. Likewise, the calendar is different. Halloween articles rolled in way back in the summer and today Christmas items are passing you on the conveyor belts. On December 1, the Easter season starts, the tour guide explains.

Sacrificing a few hours is the maximum expense the “We sell for less”-company is willing to spend on you. And thus, a hungry group of MBA students invades Woodland’s fast food places after the tour. Satisfied, your stomach is now ready to endure three hours of curvy highways through the forests of Western Pennsylvania.
Fall is approaching unstoppably, as the colored leaves witness.

The bus glides through the scenic, monotonous area, on its way to Pittsburgh as something else gets your attention. A DVD marks the beginning of the weekend. After seeing the pinnacle of modern distribution technologies during this field trip, what would be more befitting than the medieval setting of Monty Python and the Holy Grail?