From:     Buck Pavemore
              President & CEO
              Wal-Mart Stores

    To:       Wal-Mart Associates
    Subject:  Letter from the CEO

Dear associates,

This has been a fantastic year for us. I want to thank each and every one of you for your hard work and dedication. And I want to share with you my vision for the future. A future we can start building today, a future we can all be proud of. We have been very successful in placing Wal-Mart stores within city limits, and the response has been fantastic. People want Wal-Mart close to where they live and shop. And Wal-Mart continues to benefit the communities in which we are located. I'm glad to report that last year we gave one tenth of one percent of our gross revenue to community organizations! Moving forward, I'd like to share our strategic development plans with you, and let you know some of the exciting changes that are coming soon.

This trail is not without challenges. We've had some problems in the past with brand confusion between Wal-Mart, KMart, and Walgreens. I'm not sure people really understand the differences. So we've decided to complete acquistion of KMart and Walgreens. We will now be able to offer our customers one brand, one location, one super SuperStore! And I think you're really going to like this: we're calling the new stores Town-Green. The idea is to bring the green in Wal-Mart/KMart/Walgreens to "your town". And not just to your town, but right to your town green. Talk about convenience! Now our customers will be able to shop for everything they need, under one roof, and right in the middle of town. The "town green" now means Selection, Quality, Value, and Location, Location, Location! All at Town-Green!

We're targeting some great locations. All of these locations are open, and ready for development. All of them are smack dab in the middle of town, are picturesque, and don't need to have any buildings removed, or existing stores relocated. In fact all of them are in town greens. From small, quaint towns like Woodstock, VT, to larger sites like Boston's Cambridge Commons, to our new flagship store, Town-Green Central, soon to be located in New York's Central Park. Yes, we've been able to buy New York's Central Park and help New York City out of it's impending bankruptcy. This is the kind of civic responsibility we at Wal-Mart are proud of.

We are very excited about this project, and we want everyone to "Come on down to the Green!" The greens in these towns has been underutilized for years. Now we want to give everyone a focal point, a destination on their green. We are teaming up with Starbucks to provide a nice cafe for each green. You can get your coffee, and stroll around inside Town-Green. It's a very hometown kind of experience. Norman Rockwell would be proud.

We're also excited about working with Barnes and Noble on the Noble Library project, where they will rejuvenate old libraries near the greens. Old dusty book collections will be updated with the latest titles people really want, and these old buildings will be remodelled to match the Barnes and Noble theme. We see walking bridges between Town-Green and Noble Library stores, over the increased capacity roadbeds. In quite a few towns, there simply isn't enough space to put Town-Green on the existing town green and have enough capacity for a parking structure, so we've arranged in these towns to replace the Grange Hall. I don't know what a Grange is anyway. Have you ever seen a Grange?

In fact, for the Capitol Town-Green, in Washington, D.C., the reflecting pond is planned to be converted to parking. We're going to have smaller ponds on each side of the parking structure, echoing the original pond, but on a much more reasonable scale. We were able to obtain this site because the Bush administration expressed an interest in the privatizing the park. In recent years, the area has fallen into some undesirable uses, such as the unpatriotic and un-American anti-war rallies. In re-developing the D.C. site, we at Wal-Mart can do our civic duty, and grow our business. In these unsettling times, it is so important to focus on presenting a united front to the evil-doers of the world, and to let them know that America is a great country. A country where we all come together to shop, to express our support for the greatest democratizing force the world has ever seen: the free market. And Americans want that market right in the middle of town, at Town-Green!