|
 |
|
|
|
|
Sam Walton
"Life has been great to me, probably better than any man has the right to expect. At home, I've been blessed with a wife and family who've stuck to together and loved each other and indulged my lifelong obsession with minding the store." "Now, I'm a friendly fellow by nature -- I always speak to folks in the street and such" "When it comes to Wal-Mart, there's no two ways about it: I'm cheap." "... Then, of course, the icing on the cake was when James Cash Penney himself visited the store one day ... I still remember him showing me how to tie and package merchandise, how to wrap it with very little twine and very little paper but still make it look nice." "From the time I took my first bank loan -- $1800 to buy that ice cream machine from the Ben Franklin down in Newport -- I was never really comfortable with debt. But I recognized it as a necessity of doing business, and I had gotten pretty good at accumulating it." "A lot of what goes on these days with high-flying companies and these overpaid CEO's who're really just looting from the top and aren't watching out for anybody but themselves really upsets me. " "Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity. The things that we were forced to learn and do, because we started out underfinanced and undercapitalized ..." "Here's the simple lesson we learned -- which others were learning at the same time and eventually changed the way retailers and customers buy all across America: say I bought an item for 80 cents. I found that by pricing it at $1.00 I could sell three times more of it than pricing it at $1.20."
|
