Sam Walton Quotes

One thing my and mother and dad shared completely was their approach to money - they just didn't spend it.

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.

Celebrate your success and find humor in your failures. Don't take yourself so seriously. Loosen up and everyone around you will loosen up. Have fun and always show enthusiasm. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song.

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

If one of our customers comes into the store without a smile, I'll give them one of mine.

There’s a lot more business out there in small town America than I ever dreamed of.

...You can make a positive out of most any negative if you work at it hard enough.

I've always been driven to buck the system.

Leaders must always put their people before themselves. If you do that, your business will take care of itself.

I believe in always having goals, and always setting them high.

I've owned about 18 airplanes over the years, and I've never bought one of them new.

Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.

To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.

Most everything I've done I've copied from somebody else.

If you don't listen to your customers, someone else will.

"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."

There are only four things in life that matter. The first is happiness and I'll sell you the other three for a dollar.

Curiosity doesn't kill the cat; it kills the competition.

It is unhealthy to marinate in your own press clippings.

Individuals don't win in business, teams do.

I learned early on that one of the secrets to campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I did that in college. I did it when I carried my papers. 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. Before long, I probably knew more students than anybody in the university, and they recognized me and considered me their friend.

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

You can't just keep doing what works one time, everything around you is changing. To succeed, stay out in front of change.

Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don't become too predictable.

There is only one boss. The customer.

You can learn from everybody.

I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Wal-Mart.

Do it. Try it. Fix it.

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 not only knew I wanted to go into retailing, I also knew I wanted to go into business for myself.

Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.

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

Focus on something the customer wants, and then deliver it.