On the second of July, three very different stories collided in history. In 1982, Larry Walters, a Los Angeles truck driver, strapped forty-two helium weather balloons to his lawn chair and accidentally shot into commercial airline airspace at fifteen thousand feet. He drifted over Long Beach with sandwiches, a pellet gun, and a dream before descending into power lines and getting arrested. Twenty years before that, Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in Rogers, Arkansas, launching what would become the world’s largest company by revenue. And in 1997, Thailand abandoned its currency peg to the US dollar, triggering the Asian financial crisis that spread across Southeast Asia and reshaped global economics. One day, three moments, wildly different scales: a man in a garden chair, an economy in freefall, and a discount shop that quietly changed how the world shops.
