Walmart Overhead 18% - Everybody Else 21%

If you have a 3% advantage on overhead you can slowly destroy your competition.

Rule 9: Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty-five years running — long before Wal-Mart was known as the nation's largest retailer — we've ranked No. 1 in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

My thought - It takes more effort to increase sales than it does to cut costs.