High expectations are the key to everything.

I was asked what I thought about the recession. I thought about it and decided not to take part.

I'd still say that visiting the stores and listening to our folks was one of the most valuable uses of my time as an executive. But really, our best ideas usually do come from the folks in the stores. Period.

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

"Somehow over the years people have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was...just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. But...it was an outgrowth of everything we'd been doing since [1945]...And like most overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making."

Communicate everything you can to your associates. The more they know, the more they care. Once they care, there is no stopping them.

The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.