A series of happy coincidences show Karl Beeman that his Walmart career was meant to be.
Have you ever experienced a coincidence that felt more like destiny — one of those moments that makes you believe in fate and tells you that you’re exactly where you should be?
For associate Karl Beeman, it happened at a Walmart Veteran’s Day celebration.
But before we can take you to that moment in Karl’s journey, we’ll need to go back to the 90s.
It was 1993 and Karl sat aboard a Coast Guard ship heading to Antarctica on his first deployment. “I was 20 years old. It was my first time away from home other than bootcamp,” Karl shares.
Before cell phones and email were everyday tools, handwritten mail was worth its weight in gold for service members far from home. So Karl was happy, if puzzled, when he was handed an envelope addressed to “any service member.”
Inside, the young coastie found a letter from a stranger who signed off as “The Coast Guard Lady.” She shared what was going on in her life and thanked him for his service. “I read her letter probably 16 times,” he recalls.
Connections and coincidences
2013 finds Karl stateside, preparing for retirement from a successful Coast Guard career, at his local Walmart. “The night before my wife’s birthday, I went to Walmart to buy her a mountain bike.”
It’s 10 p.m., and the store is mostly empty. When Karl spots an associate, he asks for help getting a bike from the back room. He soon realized he needed two bikes so he could ride with his wife, but the only other bike was on display. The associate helped take down the bike from the display rack and pushed one of the bikes in a cart as Karl wheeled the other out to his car.
Karl was so impressed with the outstanding customer service that he emailed the store manager.
“A week later, my phone rings and it’s the store manager who received my email,” Karl recalls. “I said I wanted to tell her about the associate who provided great service.”
Her reply? “Well, that’s me!”
It made an impression on Karl. “I realized that if a store manager would drop everything at 10 p.m. to help a customer, that's a company I wanted to work for.”
He started following Walmart on LinkedIn, found a job opening and his Walmart career in Global Leadership Development began.
Blast from the past
And now we bring you back to that fateful moment — serendipity with a sprinkle of destiny.
During Karl’s third year at Walmart, he attended a Veteran’s Day celebration at our Home Office in Northwest Arkansas.
“They introduced Lois Bouton, known as The Coast Guard Lady!” Karl says with a smile. “And that took me back more than 20 years to my first deployment.”
“After the ceremony, I couldn't wait to talk to her,” he says. “I knelt down by her wheelchair and told her how much her letter had meant to me.”
It turns out, Lois wrote 100,000+ letters to service members over 50 years. She was active in SPARS (Semper Paratus—Always Ready), the women's branch of the United States Coast Guard created during World War II.
And that’s how Karl met the woman responsible for a much-appreciated letter 20-plus years after his first deployment — all thanks to a veterans’ event at Walmart.
Meant to be
Since his start at Walmart, Karl has built a career focused on teaching and development, using skills he learned in the Coast Guard every day. Most recently, Karl became senior manager of global talent and leadership for Sam’s Club.
“I'm working to help roll out leadership development classes for Sam's managers in their clubs,” he explains. “It will be a four-day class. It’s hands-on training that will take place in both Walmart Academy and also in Sam's Club.”
He admires Walmart’s culture and believes it’s a big reason that many associates stick around. “Walmart has associates that stay for 20, 30, even 40 years,” he says. “You can move around, you can move up, you can go laterally. The joke is, we have every job but astronaut — and that’s probably coming.”
“That was one reason I decided to take the job at Walmart, because if someone is willing to stay that long, it’s a good company.”
With 13 years behind him, Karl plans to stick around to join the ranks of gold-badge associates. And he believes it’s meant to be.
“I believe in fate,” Karl says. “It was just crazy that that The Coast Guard Lady would write me a letter, crazy that she's in Arkansas, and I would follow and join a company from Arkansas, and then she would end up at the Veteran’s Day ceremony.”
For Karl, “Life has come full circle!”
