Sam Walton: Made In America

by Sam Walton

So maybe by telling it the way it really happened, we can help some other folks down the line take these same principles and apply them to their dreams and make them come true.

That’s one reason I’m probably not the best negotiator in the world; I lack the ability to squeeze that last dollar.

Dad never had the kind of ambition or confidence to build much of a business on his own,

I also started selling magazine subscriptions, probably as young as seven or eight years old, and I had paper routes from the seventh grade all the way through college. I raised and sold rabbits and pigeons too, nothing really unusual for country boys of that era.

the best way to reduce paying estate taxes is to give your assets away before they appreciate.

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 foolishness, I’ll come back and haunt you. So don’t even think about it.

money never has meant that much to me, not even in the sense of keeping score.

I’m not sure I ever really figured out this celebrity business. Why in the world, for example, would I get an invitation to Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding out in Hollywood?

‘How do you inspire a grandchild to go to work if they know they’ll never have a poor day in their life?’ ”

I’ve always held the bar pretty high for myself: I’ve set extremely high personal goals.

Looking back on such boyhood episodes helps me to realize now that I’ve always had a strong bias toward action—a trait that has been a big part of the Wal-Mart story.

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.

I bought a real old Ford, and I traveled the whole state that summer, interviewing potential Beta candidates. With all this competitive spirit and ambition I had back then, I even entertained thoughts of one day becoming President of the United States.

had continued to throw a newspaper route all through high school, and in college I added a few more routes, hired a few helpers, and turned it into a pretty good business. I made about $4,000 to $5,000 a year, which at the end of

he was a little bit scatterbrained at times. He’d have so many things going, he’d almost forget one. But, boy, when he focused on something, that was it.”

In addition to the newspapers, I waited tables in exchange for meals, and I was also the head lifeguard in charge of the swimming pool.

Both of them made me job offers. I accepted the one from JC Penney; I turned down the one from Sears Roebuck. Now I realize the simple truth: I got into retailing because I was tired and I wanted a real job.

Maybe you’re just not cut out for retail.”

This kind of got me down in the dumps, and since I was just waiting around to be called up anyway I quit my Penney’s job and wandered south, toward Tulsa, with some vague idea of seeing what the oil business

I went to the library there and checked out every

book on retailing.

What they had was a Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas—a cotton and railroad town of about 7,000 people, in the Mississippi River Delta

I didn’t know the first thing about how to evaluate a proposition like this so I jumped right in with both feet. I bought it for $25,000—$5,000 of our own money and $20,000 borrowed from Helen’s father.

I wanted my little Newport store to be the best, most profitable variety store in Arkansas within five years. I felt I had the talent to do it, that it could be done, and why not go for it?

It had sales of about $72,000 a year, but its rent was 5 percent of sales—

After that, I was on my own, and we opened for business on September 1, 1945.

you can learn from everybody. I didn’t just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably learned the most from studying what John Dunham was doing across the street.

In fact, I used their accounting system long after I’d started breaking their rules on everything else.

Somehow or another, I got in touch by letter with a manufacturer’s agent out of New York named Harry Weiner.

this is really the essence of discounting: by cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail price than you would have by selling the item at the higher price. In retailer language, you can lower your markup but earn more because of the increased volume.

I began to mull this idea in Newport, but it would be another ten years before I took it seriously.

can’t be the same one I knew in Des Moines,” he said. “That fellow couldn’t have amounted to anything.” He came next door and we both had a big laugh about it when he saw that I really was that kid who couldn’t write so you could read it.

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.

I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses, and I didn’t do so then. It’s not just a corny saying that you can make a positive out of most any negative if you work at it hard enough.

Also, it may have been about then that I began encouraging our oldest

boy—six-year-old Rob—to become a lawyer.

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.

It was a huge store for Bentonville at the time—50 feet by 80 feet, or 4,000 square feet.

I read an article about these two Ben Franklin stores up in Minnesota that had gone to self-service—a brand-new concept at the time. I rode the bus all night long to two little towns up there—Pipestone and Worthington.

I’ll never forget this. Sam takes a look, frowns, and says: ‘One thing we gotta do, Charlie. We gotta be real strong in lingerie.’ Times had been hard, and some of those under-things were pretty ragged.”

And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.

most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else—

probably lost $25,000, and that was at a time when Helen and I were counting every dollar. It was probably the biggest mistake of my business career. I did learn a heck of a lot about the real estate business from the experience, and maybe it paid off somewhere down the line—though I would rather have learned it some cheaper way.

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.”

I got there about two in the morning and saw that the whole shopping center was practically leveled.

In fifteen years’ time, we had become the largest independent variety store operator in the United States.

I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could have alone. We pledged houses and property, everything we had.

Ours was just barely put together—highly promotional, truly ugly, heavy with merchandise—but for 20 percent less than the competition. We were trying to find out if customers in a town of 6,000 people would come to our kind of a barn and buy the same merchandise strictly because of price. The answer was yes.

On the one hand, in the community, I really am an establishment kind of guy; on the other hand, in the marketplace, I have always been a maverick who enjoys shaking things up and creating a little anarchy.