Sam Walton

It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Location 308)

Closer at hand, I had decided I wanted to be president of the university student body. I learned early on that one of the secrets to campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I did that in college. (Location 316)

As good as business was, I never could leave well enough alone, and, in fact, I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Wal-Mart. (Location 515)

Church is an important part of society, especially in small towns. Whether it’s the contacts and associations you make or the contributions you might make toward helping other folks, it all sort of ties in together. (Location 545)

Every crazy thing we tried hadn’t turned out as well as the ice cream machine, of course, but we hadn’t made any mistakes we couldn’t correct quickly, none so big that they threatened the business. Except, it turned out, for one little legal error we made right at the beginning. In all my excitement at becoming Sam Walton, merchant, I had neglected to include a clause in my lease which gave me an option to renew after the first five years. (Location 560)

course I needed somebody to run my new store, and I didn’t have much money, so I did something I would do for the rest of my run in the retail business without any shame or embarrassment whatsoever: nose around other people’s stores searching for good talent. That’s when I made my first real hire, the first manager, Willard Walker. (Location 643)

Also at that time, I had been buying all my fixtures from Ben Franklin. They were wooden standards, which was par for the course in those days, with wooden shelf brackets to hold the merchandise. Then I went somewhere to look at what Sterling Stores was doing—most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else—and saw these all-metal fixtures. (Location 667)

I can tell you this, though: after a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-Mart’s phenomenal success has been that very tendency. Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity. The things that we were forced to learn and do, because we started out underfinanced and undercapitalized in these remote, small communities, contributed mightily to the way we’ve grown as a company. Had we been capitalized, or had we been the offshoot of a large corporation the way I wanted to be, we might not ever have tried the Harrisons or the Rogers or the Springdales and all those other little towns we went into in the early days. It turned out that the first big lesson we learned was that there was much, much more business out there in small-town America than anybody, including me, had ever dreamed of. (Location 871)

Our stores really didn’t look that good—they weren’t professional at all. We opened one, store number 8 in Morrilton, Arkansas, that was really a sight. (Location 886)

We didn’t have systems. We didn’t have ordering programs. We didn’t have a basic merchandise assortment. We certainly didn’t have any sort of computers. In fact, when I look at it today, I realize that so much of what we did in the beginning was really poorly done. But we managed to sell our merchandise as low as we possibly could, and that kept us right-side-up for the first ten years—that and consistently improving our sales in these smaller markets by building up our relationship with the customers. The idea was simple: when customers thought of Wal-Mart, they should think of low prices and satisfaction guaranteed. They could be pretty sure they wouldn’t find it cheaper anywhere else, and if they didn’t like it, they could bring it back. (Location 890)

type of folks. Claude had four or five kids and was probably making $12,000 a year, maybe $10,000. I hauled up in front of his soda fountain one day and started talking to him. I found out that he had been able to save on his salary, and I usually felt that if a fellow could manage his own finances, he would be more successful managing one of our stores. (Location 958)

It’s almost embarrassing to admit this, but it’s true: there hasn’t been a day in my adult life when I haven’t spent some time thinking about merchandising. (Location 987)

“Me and Sam used to have a big time picking items. We’d go buy a Dallas newspaper and a Little Rock newspaper and a Fort Smith newspaper, and he’d say, ‘Well now, Phil, let’s make us up some kind of an ad for this weekend.’ So we’d look around the store and find a big display of socks or a big display of panties, or a wastebasket, or a broom, or a big old stack of motor oil. We’d pick out, say, twenty items, and then we’d sit down on the floor with a pair of scissors and go through those newspapers until we found some store that had run oil, and we’d just cut out the oil can and paste it on there and write ‘Pennzoil 30W’ and stick our price on it. And we’d do the same thing for the socks and the panties and the wastebasket—just make up our own ad out of everybody else’s ads in those newspapers. But it worked! Because we made real hot prices. He’d say there was no use running an ad everybody else was running for the same price, or why (Location 995)

would they come in? Sam was a dime store man so at first he wanted to make a certain percentage of profit on everything. But he came around to the idea that a real hot item would really bring them in the store so we finally started running things like toothpaste for sixteen cents a tube. Then we’d have to worry about getting enough of it in stock.” (Location 1002)

“I remember him saying over and over again: go in and check our competition. Check everyone who is our competition. And don’t look for the bad. Look for the good. If you get one good idea, that’s one more than you went into the store with, and we must try to incorporate it into our company. We’re really not concerned with what they’re doing wrong, we’re concerned with what they’re doing right, and everyone is doing something right.” (Location 1088)

“From the very beginning, Sam was always trying to instill in us that you just didn’t go to New York and roll with the flow. We always walked everywhere. We never took cabs. And Sam had an equation for the trips: our expenses should never exceed 1 percent of our purchases, so we would all crowd in these little hotel rooms somewhere down around Madison Square Garden. (Location 1118)

“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.” (Location 1197)

“You’ve got to realize this too. By being at that conference, he was absolutely in the right place at the right time. There were no such things in those days as minicomputers and microcomputers. He was really ten years away from the computer world coming. But he was preparing himself. And this is a very important point: without the computer, Sam Walton could not have done what he’s done. He could not have built a retailing empire the size of what he’s built, the way he built it. He’s done a lot of other things right, too, but he could not have done it without the computer. It would have been impossible.” (Location 1448)

was always interesting to me that, except for those folks who worked in our company, our stock got very little support early on from the folks right here in northwest Arkansas. I always had the feeling that the people around here who remembered us when we had one store and three stores, or remembered me when I was president of the Rotary or the Chamber of Commerce, somehow thought we were doing it with mirrors. They couldn’t help but think we were just lucky, that we could not continue long term to do as well as we have done. I don’t think it was anything peculiar to this part of the country or me or anything like that. I think it must be human nature that when somebody homegrown gets on to something, the folks around them sometimes are the last to recognize it. (Location 1668)

This saturation strategy had all sorts of benefits beyond control and distribution. From the very beginning, we never believed in spending much money on advertising, and saturation helped us to save a fortune in that department. 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. When we had seventy-five stores in Arkansas, seventy-five in Missouri, eighty in Oklahoma, whatever, people knew who we were, and everybody except the merchants who weren’t discounting looked forward to our coming to their town. (Location 1831)

So for the most part, we just started repeating what worked, stamping out stores cookie-cutter style. The only decision we had to make was what size format to put in what market. We had five different store sizes—running from about 30,000 to 60,000 square feet—and we would hardly ever pass up any market because it was too small. I had traveled so much myself looking at competitors in the variety store business that I had a good feel for the kind of potential in these communities. Bud and I knew what we wanted in the way of locations. (Location 1839)

Ferold Arend made a big difference in the early rollout of Wal-Marts. He was a very organized person in a way that I wasn’t. I always told him it was because he was German. But he was the kind of fellow who, if he had ten things to do in a day, would write them all down and then work to get them done. He would double back to see that people did what he told them to do. I never did that as a rule in those days. I just kept moving. (Location 1872)

was standing out in front when Sam drove up. He saw the disaster, but he was smart enough to know how hard we’d been working and that if he told the truth we would have just disintegrated. He said, ‘The store looks really good, guys.’ And he drove away and left us.” (Location 1896)

But if you asked me am I an organized person, I would have to say flat out no, not at all. Being organized would really slow me down. In fact, it would probably render me helpless. I try to keep track of what I’m supposed to do, and where I’m supposed to be, but it’s true I don’t keep much of a schedule. I think my way of operating has more or less driven Loretta Boss, and later Becky Elliott, my two secretaries, around the bend. My style is pretty haphazard. (Location 1914)

“He has always been like this. His mind works ten times faster than everybody else’s. I mean he just gets going and stays two or three jumps ahead, and he’s quick to go with what’s on his mind. If he gets something in his mind that needs to be done—regardless of what else might have been planned—the new idea takes priority, and it has to be done now. Everybody has their day scheduled, and then bang! He just calls a meeting on something. (Location 1919)

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.” (Location 2000)