168 Quotes by Sam Walton

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.

The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want

Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitor.

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

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

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.

"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."

Money and ownership alone aren't enough. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score.

Capital isn't scarce; vision is.