Sam Walton Quotes

120 Sam Walton Quotes

1 2 3



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

[Wal-Mart] 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. It’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t and about sticking to your guns. But I think more than anything it proves there’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they’re given the opportunity and encouragement and the incentive to do their best.
Sam Walton

Wal-Mart: ordinary people joined together to accomplish extraordinary things.
Sam Walton

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

We don’t need to buy a yacht.
Sam Walton

Some families sell their stocks off a little bit at a time to live high, and then – boom – somebody takes them over, and it all goes down the drain.
Sam Walton

On the road we sleep two to a room, although as I’ve gotten older I have finally started to stay in my own room. We stay in Holiday Inns and Ramada Inns and Day Inns, and we eat at family restaurants – when we have time to eat.
Sam Walton

A lot of what goes on these days with high-flying companies and these overpaid CEO’s who’re really just looking from the top and aren’t watching out for anybody but themselves really upsets me. It’s one of the main things wrong with American business today.
Sam Walton

I have always pursued everything I was interested in with a true passion – some would say obsession – to win. I’ve always held the bar pretty high for myself: I’ve set extremely high personal goals.
Sam Walton

I 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 the depression was fairly serious money.
Sam Walton



Insurance seemed like a natural for me because I thought I could sell. I have always sold things.
Sam Walton

I loved retail from the beginning, and I still love it today.
Sam Walton

‘Walton’, Blake [J. C. Penny’s New York Manager] would say to me when he came to Des Moines, ‘I’d fire you if you weren’t such a good salesman. Maybe you’re just not cut out for retail.’
Sam Walton

I not only knew I wanted to go into retailing, I also knew I wanted to go into business for myself.
Sam Walton

I was twenty-seven years old and full of confidence, but 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 [His wife for over 50 years] father. My naiveté about contracts and such would later come back to haunt me in a big way.
Sam Walton

You can learn from everybody.
Sam Walton

I was always looking for offbeat suppliers or sources.
Sam Walton

Here’s the simple lesson we learned-which others were learning at the same time and which eventually changed the way retailers seel and customers buy all across America: say I bought an item for 80 cents. I found that by pricing it at $1.00 I could sell three times more of it than by pricing it at $1.20. I might make only half the profit per item, but because I was selling three times as many, the overall profit was greater. Simple enough. But 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.
Sam Walton

I screwed my courage up and went down to the bank and borrowed what at the time seemed like an astronomical sum of $1,800 to buy that thing [Ice cream machine]. That was the first money I ever borrowed from a bank.
Sam Walton

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. Except, it turned out, for one little legal error we made right in the beginning. In all my excitement at becoming Sam Walton, merchant, I had neglected to include a clause in my lease which gave me an option to renew after the first five years.
Sam Walton



I had built the best variety store in the whole region and worked hard in the community – done everything right – and now I was being kicked out of town. It didn’t seem fair. I blamed myself for ever getting suckered into such an awful lease, and I was furious at the landlord.
Sam Walton

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. I’ve always thought of problems as challenges, and this one wasn’t any different. I don’t know if that experience changed me or not.
Sam Walton

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.
Sam Walton

Right away I started looking around for store opportunities in other towns. Maybe it was just my itch to do more business, and maybe too, I didn’t want all my eggs in one basket again.
Sam Walton

I remember sitting on the square right after I bought it [One of the first Walton’s stores] listening to a couple of the local codgers say: ‘Well, we’ll give that guy sixty days, maybe ninety. He won’t be there long.’
Sam Walton

I did something I would do for the rest of my run in the retail business without any shame or embarrassment whatsoever: nose around other people’s stores searching for good talent.
Sam Walton

Most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else.
Sam Walton

‘You want to gamble and go into this thing?’ [Opening a store in a new shopping centre with his brother Bud] And he [Bud] said, ‘Might as well.’ And we did.
Sam Walton

Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart… We pledged houses and property, everything we had. We were about to go into the discount business for real now. And from the time those doggone Wal-Marts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging.
Sam Walton

I’m a pretty conservative guy. But for some reason in business, I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been.
Sam Walton



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. And sometimes the establishment has made me mad.
Sam Walton

I guess everybody who knew I was going ahead with the discounting idea on my own really did think I’d completely lost my mind.
Sam Walton

Here’s what make me laugh today: it would have been absolutely impossible to convince anybody back then that in thirty years most all of the early discounters would be gone, that three of these four new chains would be the biggest, best-run operators in the business, that the one to fold up would be Woolco, and that the biggest, most profitable one would be the one down in Arkansas. Sometimes even I have trouble believing it.
Sam Walton

After a lifetime of swimming up-stream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-Mart’s phenomenal success has been that very tendency.
Sam Walton

Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity.
Sam Walton

The things that we were forced to learn and do, because we started out under financed and under capitalised in these remote, small communities, contributed mightily to the way we’ve grown as a company. Had we been capitalised, or had we been the offshoot of a large corporation the way I wanted to be, we might not ever have tried the Harrisons or the Rogers or the Springdales [Smaller country towns at the time] and all those other little towns we went into in the early days.
Sam Walton

What we were obsessed with was keeping our prices below everybody else’s.
Sam Walton

Everybody worked like crazy to keep the expenses down.
Sam Walton

We didn’t have systems. We didn’t have ordering programs. We didn’t have a basic merchandise assortment. We certainly didn’t have any sort of computers. In fact, when I look at it today, I realise that so much of what we did in the beginning was really poorly down. But we managed to sell our merchandise as low as we possibly could, and that kept us right-side-up for the first ten years – that and consistently improving our sales in these smaller markets by building up our relationship with the customers.
Sam Walton

The idea was simple: when customers thought of Wal-Mart, they should think of low prices and satisfaction guaranteed. They could be pretty sure they wouldn’t find it cheaper anywhere else, and if they didn’t like it, they could bring it back.
Sam Walton



1 2 3

Return from Sam Walton Quotes to Quoteswise.com