I had heard many times that Wal-Mart saved costs by reducing the size of its associates’ business cards. I long kept this story for a myth until I met in December with Ben Dolan in New-York. Ben is a senior Director at Sam’s club, a chain belonging to Wal-Mart.

He confirmed the story and provided me with a comparison of the two formats. He also told me about this internal project which aimed at saving one single line on every receipt. The project was implemented and all in all it represents 60,000$ savings per year !

My take:

When you adopt a cost-based strategy how far do you need to go to keep your costs at their minimum?