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Sam Walton opened Wal-Mart Discount City on Rogers' Highway 71, his first store under the name after a decade running Ben Franklin variety stores. The format was the bet: lower margins on everything, in towns the big chains had written off as too small.

Amazon.com went live from a rented house in Bellevue, Washington, selling books out of a garage-scale operation with a catalogue it did not stock. Within a month it had shipped to all fifty states and forty-five countries.

The chain told its staff it would wind down or sell all 735 of its US stores, ending a company that had defined the category-killer format for forty years. A leveraged buyout in 2005 left it carrying about $5bn of debt it never worked off.

IKEA shut its only Tennessee store after nearly a decade, taking 114 jobs with it. The company called the closure part of a strategic shift, decided on a review of "market share, business performance, cost structure, and overall optimization of physical assets"; Mid-South customers keep online ordering and FedEx pickup.

Costco opens a new warehouse at 10 SE Oldham Parkway by the Missouri 291 and US 50 interchange, giving the southeast side of the Kansas City metro its own club. It carries the full format: fuel station, tyre centre, food court, pharmacy, optical and hearing aids.

Amazon's 48-hour fall Prime Day sale, with Prime member-exclusive deals across more than 35 categories and new Today's Big Deals dropping three times a day. It kicks off the holiday shopping season in 22 countries.

The long-awaited Amherst warehouse opens in suburban Buffalo, the newest of the ten US clubs Costco is opening this autumn. It is one of five October openings spread across Missouri, Texas, New York, Kansas and California.