Sam Walton Quotes
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Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.
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I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.
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Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune.
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I learned this early on in the variety business: You've got to give folks responsibility, you've got to trust them, and then you've got to check on them.
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Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.
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I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.
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I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn't I would still speak to them.
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Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures.
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There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
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All of us profit from being corrected - if we're corrected in a positive way.
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One person seeking glory doesn't accomplish very much.
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I got into retailing because I wanted a real job.
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All that hullabaloo about somebody's net worth is just stupid, and it's made my life a lot more complex and difficult.
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If everybody is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.
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Capital isn't scarce; vision is.
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Exceed your customer's expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want - and a little more.
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I've never been one to dwell on reverses.
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What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
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Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.
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We're all working together; that's the secret.
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The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers.
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Maybe I was born to be a merchant, maybe it was fate. I don't know about that. But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning.
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I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.
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The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.