Individuals don't win in business, teams do.

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

"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."

Exceed your customer's expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want - and a little more.

Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

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