A lot of what goes on these days with high-flying companies and these overpaid CEO’s, who’re really just looting from the top and aren’t watching out for anybody but themselves, really upsets me. It’s one of the main things wrong with American business today.
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Sam Walton
Meet a genuine American folk hero cut from the homespun cloth of America's heartland: Sam Walton, who parlayed a single dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world. The undisputed merchant king of the late tw
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Some families sell their stock off a little at a time to live high, and then—boom—somebody takes them over, and it all goes down the drain. One of the real reasons I’m writing this book is so my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read it years from now and know this: If you start any of that…
Actually, during this whole early period, Wal-Mart was too small and insignificant for any of the big boys to notice, and most of the promoters weren’t out in our area so we weren’t competitive. That helped me get access to a lot of information about how they were doing things. I probably visited mo…
As usual, some of our critics—mostly unions in this case—took a shot at me for this idea. They said I was wrapping myself in the flag and pulling a typical Sam Walton promotion to hide the fact that we sell a lot of import goods. These folks, I’m afraid, are really living in the past. They don’t bel…
When you move like we did from town to town in these mostly rural areas, word of mouth gets your message out to customers pretty quickly without much advertising.
And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.
Creating a huge personal fortune was never particularly a goal of mine, and the proof of that lies in the fact that even to this day most of my, and my family’s, wealth remains in the form of Wal-Mart stock. I think most people in our position would have hedged their bets a long time ago and diversi…
The basic discounter’s idea was to attract customers into the store by pricing these items—toothpaste, mouthwash, headache remedies, soap, shampoo—right down at cost. Those were what the early discounters called your “image” items. That’s what you pushed in your newspaper advertising—like the twenty…
We opened one, store number 8 in Morrilton, Arkansas, that was really a sight. We rented this old Coca-Cola bottling plant. It was all broken up into five rooms, and we bought some old fixtures from a failing Gibson’s store for $3,000. We hung them by baling wire from the ceiling. We had clothes han…
I don’t subscribe much to any of these fancy investing theories, and most people seem surprised to learn that I’ve never done much investing in anything except Wal-Mart. I believe the folks who’ve done the best with Wal-Mart stock are those who have studied the company, who have understood our stren…
The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: “Satisfaction Guaranteed.” They’re still up there, and they have made all the difference.
Every time Wal-Mart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customers’ pockets. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition—which is where we always plan to be.
He proved that people can be motivated. The mountain is there, but somebody else has already climbed it.
Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who’s going to have a great idea.”
What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable…
For my whole career in retail, I have stuck by one guiding principle. It’s a simple one, and I have repeated it over and over and over in this book until I’m sure you’re sick to death of it. But I’m going to say it again anyway: the secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they…
What we guard against around here is people saying, ‘Let’s think about it.’ We make a decision. Then we act on it.
I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.