Sam Walton: Made In America

by Sam Walton

Now, I would love to tell you that this partnership was all part of my master plan from the beginning, that as a young man I had some sort of vision of a great retailing company in which all the employees would be awarded a stake in the business. That I saw them having the opportunity to participate in many of the decisions that would determine the profitability of that business. I would love to tell you that from the very beginning we always paid our employees better than anyone else paid theirs, and treated them as equals. I would love to tell you all that, but unfortunately none of it would be true. In the beginning, I was so chintzy I really didn’t pay my employees very well. The managers were fine. From the time we started branching out into more stores, we always had a partnership with the store managers. Those guys I’ve already told you about, like Willard Walker and Charlie Baum and Charlie Cate, all had a piece of their stores’ profits from the beginning. But we really didn’t do much for the clerks except pay them an hourly wage, and I guess that wage was as little as we could get by with at the time. In fairness to myself, though, that was pretty much the way retail was in those days, especially in the independent variety store part of the business.