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.
Capital isn’t scarce; vision is.
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.
I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.
Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.
We let folks know we’re interested in them and that they’re vital to us. cause they are.
Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.
Individuals don’t win in business, teams do.
Don’t get so stuck in your ways that you can’t change.
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.
Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.
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.
I had to get up everyday with my mind set on improving something.
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.
The job of senior management is to cultivate an environment where store managers can learn from the market and from each other.
It’s just paper – all I own is a pickup truck and a little Wal-Mart stock.
Take the best out of everything and adapt it to your needs.
The way management treats their associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers.
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.