Sam Walton

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.

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

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

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.

The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say. It's terribly important for everyone to get involved. Our best ideas come from clerks and stock boys.

I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that.

We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.

What we guard against around here is people saying, 'Let's think about it.' We make a decision. Then we act on it.

I've always had a strong bias towards action.

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.

It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Capital isn't scarce. Vision is.

Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.

When we're thinking small, that's another thing we're always on the lookout for: big egos. You don't have to have a small ego to work here, but you'd better know how to make it look small, or you might wind up in trouble.

The small stores were just destined to disappear, at least in the numbers they once existed, because the whole thing is driven by the customers, who are free to choose where to shop.

I want you to promise that whenever you come within ten feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him.

Sam got on the system and reached out to every store employee, asking them to make eye contact and say hello to every customer.

A most unusual aspect of the Waltons was that they believed in family ownership. Way back in 1953, following a model created by Helen's father, Sam gave all his shares in the company to a family corporation... Sam continuously worried that his kids and grandkids would get into fights like rich kids often do.

He always said hello to strangers and friends alike. Your status or popularity did not matter; Sam knew all the janitors by name.

Sam later claimed that he had spent more time in Kmart stores than any Kmart executive... Unlike many businesspeople, Sam never focused on the weaknesses or problems of his competitors, he only looked to see what they were doing better than Walmart.