Walmart's Hometown Is America's Largest Dividend Collector
Walmart's Hometown Is America's Largest Dividend Collector
(Bloomberg) -- Arkansas cities and towns don’t usually place at the top of average-income rankings, which tend to be dominated by addresses in California, New York or Florida.
But Bentonville is no average place. Its per-capita ordinary dividend of $446,000 in 2016 was followed by Florida neighborhoods in Miami Beach and Palm Beach at $410,000 and $244,000, respectively, according to an analysis by Bloomberg.
The zip code 72712, one of the two in the Arkansas city with a population of 45,000, is where Walton Enterprises LLC and the Walton Family Foundation are located. Those organizations own about half of the world’s largest retailer. The other zip code is a nonresidential one, the official home address of Walmart Inc.
Walton Enterprise held about 1.4 billion shares of Walmart as of the retailer’s latest filing, with various scions and the Walton Family Holdings Trust collectively owning another 50 million shares. Jim Walton, Rob Walton and Alice Walton, the richest family members, were worth a combined $136.3 billion as of April 4, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Walmart generated fiscal year 2019 revenue of $514.4 billion.
Average dividends provide a different view of America Inc. than many other income lists.
Among the tax filings of 22,000-plus zip codes Bloomberg evaluated, those hosting the headquarters of S&P 500 Index members filed five times more in dividend income, on average, than areas without a major company.
Top “S&P zip codes” with the highest average passive income from dividends include Clayton, Missouri (63105), home to S&P member Centene Corp., a health care concern, as well as Purchase, New York (10577), where PepsiCo. Inc. and Mastercard Inc. headquarters are located.
To contact the reporters on this story: Lee Miller in Bangkok at lmiller@bloomberg.net;Wei Lu in New York at wlu30@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Tanzi at atanzi@bloomberg.net, Virginia Van Natta
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