Top 90 Sam Walton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I loved retail from the beginning, and I still love it today.”

— Sam Walton

52. “Job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.”

— Sam Walton

53. “Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.”

— Sam Walton

54. “Every time Wal-Mart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customers’ pockets. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition – which is where we always plan to be.”

— Sam Walton

55. “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.”

— Sam Walton

56. “What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path. As.”

— Sam Walton

57. “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.”

— Sam Walton

58. “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.”

— Sam Walton

59. “Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.”

— Sam Walton

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

— Sam Walton

61. “There are only four things in life that matter. The first is happiness and I’ll sell you the other three for a dollar.”

— Sam Walton

62. “If one of our customers comes into the store without a smile, I’ll give them one of mine.”

— Sam Walton

63. “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.”

— Sam Walton

64. “Money and ownership alone aren’t enough. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score.”

— Sam Walton

65. “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.”

— Sam Walton

66. “Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.”

— Sam Walton

67. “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.”

— Sam Walton

68. “The job of senior management is to cultivate an environment where store managers can learn from the market and from each other.”

— Sam Walton

69. “The first one is could a Wal-Mart-type story still occur in this day and age? My answer is of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there’s someone – probably hundreds of thousands of someones – with good enough ideas to go all the way. It will be done again, over and over, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. It’s all a matter of attitude and the capacity to constantly study and question the management of the business.”

— Sam Walton

70. “I not only knew I wanted to go into retailing, I also knew I wanted to go into business for myself.”

— Sam Walton

71. “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.”

— Sam Walton

72. “The small stores were just destined to disappear, at least in the numbers they once existed, because the whole thing is driven by the customers, who are free to choose where to shop.”

— Sam Walton

73. “If American business is going to prevail, and be competitive, we’re going to have to get accustomed to the idea that business conditions change, and that survivors have to adapt to those changing conditions. Business is a competitive endeavor, and job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.”

— Sam Walton

74. “Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction.”

— Sam Walton

75. “I always favored the mavericks who challenged my rules. I may have fought them all the way, but I respected them, and, in the end, I listened to them a lot more closely than I did the pack who always agreed with everything I said.”

— Sam Walton

76. “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.”

— Sam Walton

77. “There’s a lot more business out there in small town America than I ever dreamed of.”

— Sam Walton

78. “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.”

— Sam Walton

79. “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.”

— Sam Walton

80. “And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making. Of.”

— Sam Walton

81. “One thing my and mother and dad shared completely was their approach to money – they just didn’t spend it.”

— Sam Walton

82. “It is unhealthy to marinate in your own press clippings.”

— Sam Walton

83. “We let folks know we’re interested in them and that they’re vital to us. cause they are.”

— Sam Walton

84. “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.”

— Sam Walton

85. “I’ve always been driven to buck the system.”

— Sam Walton

86. “I’ve owned about 18 airplanes over the years, and I’ve never bought one of them new.”

— Sam Walton

87. “Expenses should never exceed one percent of our purchases.”

— Sam Walton

88. “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.”

— Sam Walton

89. “Watson, Sr., was running IBM, he decided they would never have more than four layers from the chairman of the board to the lowest level in the company. That may have been one of the greatest single reasons why IBM was successful.”

— Sam Walton

90. “Business is a competitive endeavor, and job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living. To.”

— Sam Walton

91. “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.”

— Sam Walton

92. “What we guard against around here is people saying, ‘Let’s think about it.’ We make a decision. Then we act on it.”

— Sam Walton