Sam Walton

"To serve customers in the home decorating and crafting area, you simply have to have a wide selection. A few years back, Sam Walton opened five craft stores called Helen’s (named after his wife). Before long, he found it so different, so opposite to the Wal-Mart model, he got out of the field. A craft store is in “the parts business.” If a woman wants to do a project that requires ten parts, and Hobby Lobby has only eight of them, she’s going to give up in frustration. We have to carry all ten parts."

"The entrepreneur is often presented as a visionary, bearing from the outset the idea, the plan, the strategy that will lead to his success. Our care- ful study of career biographies suggests rather a process of improvement through trial and error, depending on opportunities, a sequence of im- provised adaptations gradually assembled into a coherent course of con- duct: the celebrated "strategy" was often only the rationalization after the fact of the conditions for success. The careers of Sam Walton and IKEA's"

"Sam Walton’s reputation for hard bargaining with vendors highlights a second leveler that aspiring billionaires must defeat. Society runs not only according to laws, but also according to certain conventions of behavior. Individuals who unfailingly abide by these informal rules are unlikely to amass billion-dollar fortunes. In Walton’s case, the key to obtaining lower costs was a willingness to violate the retailing industry norm of cordial re¬ lations with vendors. Wal-Mart deviated even further from convention when it tried to go around manufacturers’ representatives to deal directly with manufacturers."

"In 1977, Walton bought a 16store discount chain operating in Missouri and Illinois, Mohr Super Value, and converted the outlets to Wal-Marts. He added the 104-store Big-K chain in 1981, making an attractive purchase after the 71-year-old retailer overextended itself through an acquisition and construction of an expen¬ sive corporate headquarters. After entering the warehouse club segment, Wal-Mart acquired the Midwest-based, 27-store Wholesale Club chain. When the time came to begin entering larger cities, Walton bought the 21 D. H. Holmes department stores to gain a foothold in New Orleans. In short, Sam Walton’s success had a touch of the industry consolidation magic for which Wayne Huizenga became famous."

"Walton’s children grew up knowing that family vacations would in¬ clude excursions to gather intelligence on competitors’ stores. When he drove his daughter, Alice, to horse shows, his wife assumed that he was staying and watching. In truth, father and daughter had a pact that al¬ lowed him to go off and look at stores while she exhibited her horses. Re¬ tailer Sol Price complained that when he and his wife socialized with the Waltons, Sam unfailingly steered the conversation to such entertaining topics as how to prevent vendors from corrupting buyers with favors. “He was pretty much all business,” Price lamented.81"

"Walton’s hardheaded attitudes were at least partly inherited. His father, Thomas Walton, abandoned his early career in farming to become a mort¬ gage lender. Farmers put up part of their land as collateral for seed, paying back their loans at harvest time. If their crops failed, they defaulted on their debt and forfeited their land. Defaults were common during the diffi¬ cult economic period of the 1930s and the elder Walton repossessed hun¬ dreds of farms, often from families who had owned and farmed the land for generations. As a result of foreclosures, as well as land purchases he made with his savings, Walton’s father eventually became a millionaire. At his death in 1984, his holdings included 23 farms and ranches spread across four states.102 Given that foreclosing on farmers during the Depres¬ sion was no way to win a popularity contest, the elder Walton necessarily developed a thick skin. “I worked cattle for old man Walton for fourteen years, and let me tell you, he was a mean son of a bitch to work for,” said a longtime employee. “He didn’t take any [expletive deleted] off anyone and he didn’t care what people thought of him.”103 Some of his father’s imper¬ viousness to criticism appears to have rubbed off on Sam Walton, even if he managed his employee relations more smoothly."

"All the successful people I ever met were fanatics about focus. Sam Walton, who built Walmart, thought only about stores day and night. He visited store after store. Even Warren Buffett, who today is my partner, is a man super focused on his formula. He acquires different businesses but always within the same formula, and that’s what works. Today our formula is to buy companies with a good name and to come up with our management system. But we can only do this when we have people available to go to the company. We cannot do what the American private equity firms do. They buy any company, send someone there, and constitute a team. We only know how to do this with our team, people within our culture. Then, focus is also essential.22 Our CEOs’ business"

"Sam Walton, who founded Wal-Mart, the largest company in the world at the time, explained his secret to success like this: "I always set pretty high standards for myself: I set extremely high goals for myself personally.""

"From John D. Rockefeller to Sam Walton (and ultimately to Mike Bloomberg, I hope), great financial success comes from starting businesses with concrete products in the real world, building jobs, creating value, and helping people."

"I don’t use the euphemism “associates.” It joins “vertically challenged,” “significant other,” and other obfuscations in the contemporary lexicon. —Sam Walton"

"There is just one problem with a strong corporate culture, writes Sam Walton himself: the reluctance to change. That's why he sometimes implemented changes just for the sake of it, so that habits do not turn into bad habits."

""Give me a W ... Give me an A ... Give me an L ..." The sounds echo in the empty venue early in the morning. "Who's number one?" "THE CUSTOMER!" It's just another day at work in a discount department store. Every day the employees shout out the company's mandatory cheer.[270](private://read/01jas9tvg84jycb27616w1f9k8/notes.html#note-270) They love their job as others love their favorite football team. Walmart is the world's largest chain of discount department stores. The chain started with one store in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962 and first grew in the USA, but then internationally as well. The inspiration for the cheer was originally taken from a Korean tennis ball factory in the 70s that he visited with his wife, according to founder Sam Walton's autobiography.[271](private://read/01jas9tvg84jycb27616w1f9k8/notes.html#note-271) "It was the dirtiest place I had seen in my entire life, but Sam was very impressed. It was the first time he saw a corporate cheer," says Helen Walton in her husband's autobiography."

"Walmart invests heavily in internal competitions. When the company's pre-tax profits were over eight percent, Sam Walton danced the hula-hula on Wall Street after a bet. Most in the industry then had half as large profit margins. A manager would wrestle a bear if he lost a bet that the staff could not break a production record. Walmart does everything to break the monotony, although the spectacles have been toned down in recent years. But it is also a demanding workplace."