Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was asked what I thought about the recession. I thought about it and decided not to take part.
Job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.
Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don't become too predictable.
I not only knew I wanted to go into retailing, I also knew I wanted to go into business for myself.
Money and ownership alone aren't enough. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score.
I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.
The way management treats their associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers.
One thing my and mother and dad shared completely was their approach to money - they just didn't spend it.
Leaders must always put their people before themselves. If you do that, your business will take care of itself.
Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.
If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.
A computer can tell you down to the dime what you've sold, but it can never tell you how much you could have sold.
Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.
I had confidence that as long as we did our work well and were good to our customers, there would be no limit to us.
There are only four things in life that matter. The first is happiness and I'll sell you the other three for a dollar.
All that hullabaloo about somebody's net worth is just stupid, and it's made my life a lot more complex and difficult.
Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who's going to have a great idea.
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.
You can't just keep doing what works one time, everything around you is changing. To succeed, stay out in front of change.
If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them - not that they are working for you.
If everybody is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.
I guess in all my years, what I heard more than anything else was: a mere town cannot support a discount store for very long.
Exceed your customer's expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want - and a little more.
The job of senior management is to cultivate an environment where store managers can learn from the market and from each other.
I'd hate to see any descendants of mine fall into the category of what I'd call 'idle rich' - a group I've never had much use for.
Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitor.
Communicate everything you can to your associates. The more they know, the more they care. Once they care, there is no stopping them.
Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune.
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.
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.
Maybe I was born to be a merchant, maybe it was fate. I don't know about that. But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning.
After a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-mart's phenomenal success has been that very tendency.
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.
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.
There's absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary, working people can accomplish if they're given the opportunity and encouragement to do their best.
I learned this early on in the variety business: You've got to give folks responsibility, you've got to trust them, and then you've got to check on them.
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.
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.
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.
The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’. They're still up there, and they have made all the difference.
I don't know what would have happened to Wal-Mart if we had laid low and never stirred up the competition. My guess is that we would have remained a strictly regional operator.
If you love your work, you'll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you - like a fever.
Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.
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 stockboys.
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.
I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don't know if you're born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it.
I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America. I am just trying to get ideas, any kind of ideas that will help our company. Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone 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 learned a lesson which has stuck with me all through the years: you can learn from everybody. I didn't just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably learned the most from studying what John Dunham was doing across the street
"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."