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.

The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.

All that hullabaloo about somebody's net worth is just stupid, and it's made my life a lot more complex and difficult.

I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.

The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.

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

I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been.

For my whole career in retail, I have stuck by one guiding principle. It’s a simple one, and I have repeated it over and over and over in this book until I’m sure you’re sick to death of it. But I’m going to say it again anyway: the secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.

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.

It is a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there.