Quotes from Sam Walton

don't think that big mansions and flashy cars are what the Wal-Mart culture is supposed to be about. It's great to have the money to fall back on, and I'm glad some of these folks have been able to take off and go fishing at a fairly early age. That's fine with me. But if you get too caught up in that good life, it's probably time to move on, simply because you lose touch with what your mind is supposed to be concentrating on: serving the customer.

In those days, I tried to operate on a 2 percent general office expense structure. In other words, 2 percent of sales should have been enough to carry our buying office, our general office expense, my salary, Bud's salary—and after we started adding district managers or any other officers—their salaries too. Believe it or not, we haven't changed that basic formula from five stores to two thousand stores.

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 hanging in layers on conduit pipe all the way to the ceiling, and shelves wired into the walls. But this was really a small, small town, so number 8 was another experiment. We

But I'm going to say it again anyway: the secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want. And really, if you think about it from your point of view as a customer, you want everything: a wide assortment of good quality merchandise; the lowest possible prices; guaranteed satisfaction with what you buy; friendly, knowledgeable service; convenient hours; free parking; a pleasant shopping experience.

If you're not serving the customer, or supporting the folks who do, we don't need you. When we're thinking small, that's another thing we're always on the lookout for: big egos. You don't have to have a small ego to work here, but you'd better know how to make it look small, or you might wind up in trouble.

If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the real desire and the willingness to work his tail off to get the job done, he'll make up for what he lacks. And that proved true nine times out of ten. It was one way we were able to grow so fast.

Now, Charlie, here's what you do: on this feature bin you put three for $1.00 panties, and on this one you put four for $1.00. And you put these nylons right in between the two of them. And then watch em sell.' And they did. Like crazy.

northwest Arkansas appealed to us for several reasons. First, for Helen it was a whole lot closer to her folks in Claremore than Newport had been. And it was good for me because I wanted to get closer to good quail hunting, and with Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri all coming together right there it gave me easy access to four quail seasons in four states.

Vea con buen humor sus fracasos y no los tome muy en serio

Of all the notions I've heard about Wal-Mart, none has ever baffled me more than this idea that we are somehow the enemy of small-town America. Nothing could be further from the truth: Wal-Mart has actually kept quite a number of small towns from becoming practically extinct by offering low prices and saving literally billions of dollars for the people who live there, as well as by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in our stores.

We've got our first ad from the July 29, 1950, Benton County Democrat on display today down at our Wal-Mart Visitors Center. It's for the Grand Remodeling Sale of Walton's Five and Dime, promising a whole bunch of good stuff: free balloons for the kids, a dozen clothespins for nine cents, iced tea glasses for ten cents apiece. The folks turned out, and they kept coming. Although we called it Walton's Five and Dime, it was a Ben Franklin franchise

It's true that I was forty-four when we opened our first Wal-Mart in 1962, but the store was totally an outgrowth of everything we'd been doing since Newport—another case of me being unable to leave well enough alone, another experiment. And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.

But the truth is, some of my fondest memories are of plain old everyday items that we sold a ton of by presenting nicely on endcaps (displays at the end of aisles)—or on tables out in action alley (the big horizontal aisle running across a store just behind the checkout counters). I guess real merchants are like real fishermen: we have a special place in our memories for a few of the big ones.

JIM WALTON: "Dad always said you've got to stay flexible. We never went on a family trip nor have we ever heard of a business trip in which the schedule wasn't changed at least once after the trip was underway. Later, we all snickered at some writers who viewed Dad as a grand strategist who intuitively developed complex plans and implemented them with precision. Dad thrived on change, and no decision was ever sacred.

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.

our main real estate effort should be directed at getting out in front of expansion and letting the population build out to us. Just like in the beginning, we start around these small towns, people drive past our stores, get to know us, and become customers.

I'd get up early in the morning and milk the cows, Mother would prepare and bottle the milk, and I'd deliver it after football practice in the afternoons. We had ten or twelve customers, who paid ten cents a gallon. Best of all, Mother would skim the cream and make ice cream, and it's a wonder I wasn't known as Fat Sam Walton in those days from all the ice cream I ate.

He became, really, the best utilizer of information to control absentee ownerships that there's ever been. Which gave him the ability to open as many stores as he opens, and run them as well as he runs them, and to be as profitable as he makes them.

Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I've ever known. And once he sees he's wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction." All

Plus, as I've said, if you don't want to work weekends, you shouldn't be in retail. But

The only other reason the thing held together back then is that from the very start we would get all our managers together once a week and critique ourselves—that was really our buying organization, a bunch of store managers getting together early Saturday morning, maybe in Bentonville, or maybe in some motel room somewhere.

I guess that was the forerunner of our Saturday morning meetings. We wanted everybody to know what was going on and everybody to be aware of the mistakes we made. When somebody made a bad mistake—whether it was myself or anybody else—we talked about it, admitted it, tried to figure out how to correct it, and then moved on to the next days work.

What has carried this company so far so fast is the relationship that we, the managers, have been able to enjoy with our associates. By "associates" we mean those employees out in the stores and in the distribution centers and on the trucks who generally earn an hourly wage for all their hard work. Our relationship with the associates is a partnership in the truest sense.

Why do I drive a pickup truck? What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?