Sam Walton Quotes
120 Sam Walton Quotes
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P&G gave a 2 percent discount if you paid within ten days, and if you didn’t man, they took that discount right off. I don’t mind saying that we were the victims of a good bit of arrogance from a lot of vendors in those days. They didn’t need us, and they acted that way. I never could understand it. To me, it always seemed like a customer was a customer, and you ought to try to sell them what you could.
Sam Walton
Nowadays, you hear a lot about fancy accounting methods, like LIFO and FIFO, but back then we were using the ESP method, which really sped things along when it came time to close those books. It’s a pretty basic method: if you can’t make your books balance, you take however much they’re off by and enter it under the heading ESP, which stands for Error Some Place.
Sam Walton
Don Whitaker [First ‘regional manager’ and had one eye] was very, very important in the early development of the company, establishing the philosophy of Let’s be out front. Let’s do it right. Let’s get it down now and get on with it.
Sam Walton
We looked for the action-oriented, do-it-now, go type of folks.
Sam Walton
I usually felt that if a fellow could manage his own finances, he would be more successful managing one of our stores.
Sam Walton
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.
Sam Walton
We used to say you could sell anything if you hung it from the ceiling. So we would buy huge quantities of something and dramatise it. We would blow it out of there when everybody knew we would have only sold a few had we just left it in the normal store position. It is one of the things that has set our company apart, from the very beginning and really made us difficult to compete with. And, man, in the early days of Wal-Mart it really got crazy sometimes.
Sam Walton
I think a lot of companies would have fired Phil for that one [Buying 3,500 giant sized boxes of Tide that took up a whole 75-100 feet aisle, was 12 feet wide and went all the way up to the ceiling], but we always felt we had to try some of this crazy stuff.
Sam Walton
I guess real merchants are like real fishermen: we have a special place in our memories for a few of the big ones.
Sam Walton
I really believe our emphasis on item promotion helped us to make up for a lot of shortcomings we had – an unsophisticated buying program, a less than ideal merchandise assortment, and practically no back-office support. It was another way of swimming upstream. We made up for what we didn’t have by being merchants.
Sam Walton
When somebody made a 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 day’s work.
Sam Walton
Another way we tried hard to make up for our lack of experience and sophistication was to spend as much time as we could checking out the competition. It’s something I did from the beginning, and it’s something I insisted all our managers do.
Sam Walton
We paid absolutely no attention whatsoever to the way things were supposed to be done, you know, the way rules of retail said it had to be done.
Sam Walton
We were a store whose profit and volume had to be driven by finding real bargains on things we could promote out in the sticks.
Sam Walton
Through our combined efforts the kids received your everyday heartland upbringing, based on the same old bedrock values: a belief in the importance of hard work, honesty, neighborliness, and thrift.
Sam Walton
I guess the kids thought of themselves as slave labor back then, but we didn’t work them that hard. We just taught them the value of work.
Sam Walton
Working weekends, it’s just something you have to do if you want to be successful in the retail business.
Sam Walton
They [Sam Walton’s kids] may not have wanted to go visit all those stores while we were on vacation, but they had some idea why I was doing it. They worked in the stores, invested in the stores, and shopped in the stores.
Sam Walton
Jim [Walton] learned a lot about real estate – and the art of negotiation – from his uncle Bud. After Bud sort of stepped back from his involvement with locating and buying store sites, Jim took over. He was really good at it, and they still tell stores about him flying into some small town, unfolding his bicycle, and pedalling around looking for a good site. He never told anybody who he was, and he got some great deals. Now he’s running Walton Enterprises, the family partnership, and I think he’s almost as tight with a dollar as I am.
Sam Walton
We’re [Walton family] all pilots, so it’s really easy for us to get together on a moment’s notice.
Sam Walton
[On Alice Walton] In some ways, I believe she’s the most like me – a maverick – but even more volatile than I am.
Sam Walton
[On his wife] One of the reasons I fell for Helen [Walton] in the first place was that she was her own woman – and she has not proved a disappointment in that category.
Sam Walton
As a merchant, I’ve always tried to stay fairly neutral publicly on controversial political issues, even though I obviously have opinions…
Sam Walton
One big strain on the family… was this whole richest man in America business. I don’t know if Helen [Walton] ever really forgave me for putting us in the position to be dragged into that.
Sam Walton
Even if… future Walton’s don’t feel the need to work from dawn on into the night to stay ahead of the bill collector, I hope they’ll feel compelled to do something productive and useful and challenging with their lives.
Sam Walton
There’s no question that I have the personality of a promoter.
Sam Walton
I have occasionally heard myself compared to P.T. Barnum…
Sam Walton
I guess when folks saw me walking around scribbling notes on my coffee-stained yellow legal pad, or hauling boxes of ladies’ lingerie into the stores out of my station wagon, maybe they didn’t take me seriously.
Sam Walton
Some folks no doubt figured we were a little fly-by-night – you know, in the discount business today but out selling cars or swampland tomorrow.
Sam Walton
You didn’t have to be a genius to see discounting as a new trend that was going to sweep the country…
Sam Walton
If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart’s success.
Sam Walton
I’ll bet I’ve been in more Kmarts than anybody…
Sam Walton
I made up my mind I was going to learn something about IBM computers.
Sam Walton
I always questioned everything… It seems to me they try just a little harder and check into things a little bit closer if they think they might have a chance to prove me wrong.
Sam Walton
From the time I took out my first bank loan - $1,800 to buy that ice cream machine for the Ben Franklin down in Newport – I was never really comfortable with debt. But I recognized it as a necessity of doing business…
Sam Walton
I was tired of owing money to people I knew, and I was even more tired of begging money from strangers. I made up my mind for sure that we were going to take Wal-Mart to the stock market.
Sam Walton
One of my assets is my willingness to try something new, to change.
Sam Walton
Everybody’s got to find the thing they enjoy the most.
Sam Walton
It’s a proven fact – it costs five times more to gain a new customer than to retain a current one.
Sam Walton
Do it. Try it. Fix it.
Sam Walton
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