Samuel Moore Walton / 1918–1992 / Oklahoma, USA / Businessman, Founder of Walmart, Inc.
Business Philosophy
Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who’s going to have a great idea.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
What we guard against around here is people saying, ‘Let’s think about it.’ We make a decision. Then we act on it.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
If American business is going to prevail, and be competitive, we’re going to have to get accustomed to the idea that business conditions change, and that survivors have to adapt to those changing conditions. Business is a competitive endeavor, and job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
Business is a competitive endeavor, and job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
Watson, Sr., was running IBM, he decided they would never have more than four layers from the chairman of the board to the lowest level in the company. That may have been one of the greatest single reasons why IBM was successful.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
. . . could a Wal-Mart-type story still occur in this day and age? My answer is of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there’s someone—probably hundreds of thousands of someones—with good enough ideas to go all the way. It will be done again, over and over, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. It’s all a matter of attitude and the capacity to constantly study and question the management of the business.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
The small stores were just destined to disappear, at least in the numbers they once existed, because the whole thing is driven by the customers, who are free to choose where to shop.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
Walmart, Inc. (formerly, Wal-Mart Stores)
Every time Wal-Mart spends one 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.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
I don’t think any other retail company in the world could do what I’m going to propose to you. It’s simple. It won’t cost us anything. And I believe it would just work magic, absolute magic on our customers, and our sales would escalate, and I think we’d just shoot past our Kmart friends in a year or two and probably Sears, as well. I want you to take a pledge with me. I want you to promise that whenever you come within ten feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him. Now, I know some of you are just naturally shy, and maybe don’t want to bother folks. But if you’ll go along with me on this, it would, I’m sure, help you become a leader. It would help your personality develop, you would become more outgoing, and in time you might become manager of that store, you might become a department manager, you might become a district manager, or whatever you choose to be in the company. It will do wonders for you. I guarantee it. Now, I want you to raise your right hand—and remember what we say at Wal-Mart, that a promise we make is a promise we keep—and I want you to repeat after me: From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every time a customer comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look him in the eye, and greet him. So help me, Sam.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
It is a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
Walton on Walton
Our last Army posting was in Salt Lake City, and I went to the library there and checked out every book on retailing. I also spent a lot of my off-duty time studying ZCMI, the Mormon Church’s department store out there, just figuring that when I got back to civilian life I would somehow go into the department store business.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
The point I’m trying to make is that we as a family have bent over backward not to take advantage of Wal-Mart, not to press our ownership position unfairly, and everybody in the company knows it.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
As an old-time small-town merchant, I can tell you that nobody has more love for the heyday of the small-town retailing era than I do. That’s one of the reasons we chose to put our little Wal-Mart museum on the square in Bentonville [Arkansas]. It’s in the old Walton’s Five and Dime building, and it tries to capture a little bit of the old dime store feel. But I can also tell you this: if we had gotten smug about our early success, and said, “Well, we’re the best merchant in town,” and just kept doing everything exactly the way we were doing it, somebody else would have come along and given our customers what they wanted, and we would be out of business today.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
We used to get in some terrific fights. You have to be just as tough as they are. You can’t let them get by with anything because they are going to take care of themselves, and your job is to take care of the customer. I’d threaten Procter & Gamble with not carrying their merchandise, and they’d say, ‘Oh, you can’t get by without carrying our merchandise.’ And I’d say, ‘You watch me put it on a side counter, and I’ll put Colgate on the endcap at a penny less, and you just watch me.’ They got offended and went to Sam, and he said, ‘Whatever Claude says, that’s what it’s going to be.’ Well, now we have a real good relationship with Procter & Gamble. It’s a model that everybody talks about. But let me tell you, one reason for that is that they learned to respect us. They learned that they couldn’t bulldoze us like everybody else, and that when we said we were representing the customer, we were dead serious.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
. . . because it was from that experience that I learned a lesson which has stuck with me all through the years: 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.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: “Satisfaction Guaranteed.” They’re still up there, and they have made all the difference.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
I always favored the mavericks who challenged my rules. I may have fought them all the way, but I respected them, and, in the end, I listened to them a lot more closely than I did the pack who always agreed with everything I said.
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).
I still can’t believe it was news that I get my hair cut at the barbershop. Where else would I get it cut? Why do I drive a pickup truck? What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
Sam Walton, with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made In America (1992).