I've always been driven to buck the system.

Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.

You can learn from everybody.

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

Some families sell their stocks off a little bit at a time to live high, and then - boom - somebody takes them over, and it all goes down the drain.

Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish.

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.