Sam Walton: Made In America

by Sam Walton

“Friend, we just got after it and stayed after it,”

I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.

entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there.

My dad, Thomas Gibson Walton, was an awfully hard worker who got up early, put in long hours, and was honest.

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

If we had enough groceries, and a nice place to live, plenty of room to keep and feed my bird dogs, a place to hunt, a place to play tennis, and the means to get the lads good educations—that’s rich.

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.

took her seriously when she told me I should always try to be the best I could at whatever I took on.

was interested in with a true passion—some would say obsession—to win.

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

always had a strong bias toward action—a trait that has been a big part of the Wal-Mart story.

main talent was probably the same as my best talent as a retailer—I was a good motivator.

didn’t just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably

In retailer language, you can lower your markup but earn more because of the increased volume.

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

retail business without any shame or embarrassment whatsoever: nose around other people’s stores searching for good talent.

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.”

that we have today. What we were obsessed with was keeping our prices below everybody else’s. Our dedication to that idea was total.

The idea was simple: when customers thought of Wal-Mart, they should think of low prices and satisfaction guaranteed.

at cost. Those were what the early discounters called your “image” items. That’s what you pushed in your newspaper advertising—like the twenty-seven-cent

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.

For several years the company was just me

and he was a hard-working, practical, smart fellow.

establishing the philosophy of Let’s be out front. Let’s do it right. Let’s get it done now and get on with it.

education. And we looked for the action-oriented, do-it-now, go type of folks. Claude had four or five kids and

salary, and I usually felt that if a fellow could manage his own finances, he would be more successful managing one of our stores.

guess real merchants are like real fishermen: we have a special place in our memories for a few of the big ones.

promotion helped us to make up for a lot of shortcomings we had

sophistication was to spend as much time as we could checking out the competition.

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.”

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.

“We never finished up until about twelve-thirty at night, and we’d all go out for a beer except Mr. Walton. He’d say, ‘I’ll meet you for breakfast at six o’clock.’

unless it was partly a motivation to stay so busy all the time—but I swore early on that if I ever had a family, I would never expose it to that kind of squabbling.

hard work, honesty, neighborliness, and thrift.

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.”

remember asking Dad for permission to climb a bluff overlooking the Buffalo River. He said, ‘Do anything you’re big enough to do.’

Saturday too. Plus, as I’ve said, if you don’t want to work weekends, you shouldn’t be in retail.

the category of what I’d call “idle rich”

work from dawn on into the night to stay ahead of the bill collector,

hope they’ll feel compelled to do something productive and useful and challenging with their lives.

Anybody who has ever known anything about me knows I was never in anything for the short haul;

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.

or my way, or anybody else’s way. But you do have to work at it. And somewhere along the line, these folks stopped short of setting the goals and paying the price that needed to be paid.

proceeds to extract every piece of information in your possession. He always makes little notes. And he pushes on and on. After two and a half hours, he left, and I was totally drained.

profits and the sales were there but we needed to get better organized and come up with a more sensible way to finance the growth. I needed someone to help me with systems and distribution.

sophisticated systems. And those systems were the beginnings of a management method which allowed us to stay real close to our stores even as our growth exploded.

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

with Wal-Mart stock are those who have studied the company, who have understood our strengths and our management approach, and who, like me, have just decided to invest with us for the long run.

Wal-Mart stores and ask the folks working there, “How do you feel? How’s the company treating you?” Their answers would tell me much of what I need to know.

to the value of the stock over the long haul. I think you get what you’re worth.