Sam Walton Quotes
120 Sam Walton Quotes
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And thank goodness we never thought we had to go out and buy anything like an island.
Sam Walton
[Asked at 6:00am one morning.] How do you inspire a grandchild to go to work if they’ll never have a poor day in their life?
Sam Walton
I learned a long time ago that exercising your ego in public is definitely not the way to build an effective organization.
Sam Walton
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.
Sam Walton
[When his landlord did not renew his lease and gave Sam’s store to the landlord’s son] I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.
Sam Walton
You can make a positive out of the most negative if you work at it hard enough.
Sam Walton
The truth is when those Butler Brothers folks turned down my discounting idea, I got a little angry, and maybe that helped me decide to swim upstream on my own.
Sam Walton
Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity.
Sam Walton
[Learning from the competition] 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.
Sam Walton
Expenses should never exceed one percent of our purchases.
Sam Walton
If you don’t want to work weekends, you shouldn’t be in retail.
Sam Walton
I’d hate to see any descendants of mine fall into the category of what I’d call ‘idle rich’ – a group I’ve never had much use for.
Sam Walton
Take the best out of everything and adapt it to your needs.
Sam Walton
I don’t subscribe to any of these investing theories, and most people seem surprised to learn that I’ve never done much investing in anything except Wal-Mart stock. I believe the folks who’ve done the best with Wal-Mart stock are ones who, like me, have just decided to invest with us for the long run.
Sam Walton
We couldn’t care less about what is forecast or what the market says we ought to do. If we listened very seriously to that sort of stuff, we never would have gone into small-town discounting in the first place.
Sam Walton
But we did try to think ahead some when it came to the cities. We never planned on actually going into the cities. What we did instead was build our stores in a ring around a city – pretty far out – and wait for the growth to come to us. This strategy worked practically everywhere.
Sam Walton
The airplane turned into a great tool for scouting real estate. From up in the air we could check out traffic flows, see which way cities and towns were growing, and evaluate the location of the competition – if there was any. Then we would develop our real estate strategy for that market.
Sam Walton
I’d get down low, turn my plane up on its side, and fly right over a town. Once we had a spot picked out, we’d land, go find out who owned the property, and try to negotiate the deal right then. That’s another good reason I don’t like jets. You can’t get down low enough to really tell what’s going on, the way I could in my little planes.
Sam Walton
A good location, and what we have to pay for it, is so important to the success of a store. And it’s one area of the company in which we’ve always had family involvement.
Sam Walton
I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guys’ houses. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet.
Sam Walton
If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the real desire and the willingness to work his tail off to get the job done, he’ll make up for what he lacks. And that proved true nine times out of ten.
Sam Walton
Focus on something the customer wants, and then deliver it.
Sam Walton
And once we’ve made that decision on Friday, we expect it to be acted on in all the stores on Saturday. 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
Eat what you cook.
Sam Walton
I had to get up everyday with my mind set on improving something.
Sam Walton
To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.
Sam Walton
We sell for less.
Sam Walton
Bullheadedness
Sam Walton
[My story] 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. And it’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns.
Sam Walton
I’ve always had a passion to compete. Our story [Wal-Mart] proves that spirited competition is good for business.
Sam Walton
Individuals don’t win; teams do. Wal-Mart is just a spectacular example of what happens when people find a way to work together – where almost four hundred thousand people have come together as a group like this, with a real feeling of partnership, and have been able, for the most part, to put the needs of their individual egos behind the needs of their team.
Sam Walton
Success has always had its price and I learned that lesson the hard way when Forbes names me the so-called ‘richest man in America.’ The next thing we knew all these reporters and photographers arrived, I get to take pictures of me diving into a swimming pool full of money they imagined I had, or to watch me light big fat cigars with hundred-dollar bills while the hootchy-kootchy girls danced by the lake.
Sam Walton
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? Why do I drive a pickup truck? What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
Sam Walton
Though Helen [Wife for more than 50 years] bore more than her share, through our combined efforts the kids received your everyday heartland upbringing based on the same old bedrock values: a belief in the importance of hard work, honesty, neighbourliness, and thrift.
Sam Walton
The media usually portrayed me as a really cheap, eccentric recluse, sort of a hillbilly who more or less slept with his dogs in spite of having billions of dollars stashed away in a cave. Then when the stock market crashed in 1987, and Wal-Mart stock dropped along with everything else in the market, everybody wrote that I’d lost a half billion dollars. When they asked me about it I said, ‘It’s only paper,’ and they had a good time with that.
Sam Walton
No question about it, a lot of my attitude toward money stems from growing up during a pretty hardscrabble time in our country’s history: the Great Depression.
Sam Walton
I learned from a very early age that it was important for us kids to help provide for the home, to be contributors rather than just takers. In the process, of course, we learned how much hard work it took to get your hands on a dollar, and that when you did it was worth something. One thing my mother and ad shared completely was their approach to money: they just didn’t spend it.
Sam Walton
I don’t know what causes a person to be ambitious, but it is a fact that I have been overblessed with drive and ambition from the time I hit the ground.”
Sam Walton
My nature has always been to charge, to say let’s do it now. Often, Bud [James L. Bud Walton, Sam’s brother] would advise taking a different direction, or maybe changing the timing. I soon learned to listen to him because he has exceptional judgement and a great deal of common sense.
Sam Walton
That’s one thing we never did much of while we were building Wal-Mart, talk about ourselves or do a whole lot of bragging outside the Wal-Mart family – except when we had to convince some banker or some Wall Street financier that we intended to amount to something someday, that we were worth taking a chance on.
Sam Walton
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