Sam Walton - Made in America My Story

SAM WALTON

MADE IN AMERICA

MY STORY

by SAM WALTON

with JOHN HUEY

BANTAM BOOKS NEW YORK TORONTO LONDON SYDNEY AUCKLAND

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

SAM WALTON: MADE IN AMERICA

A Bantam Book/published by arrangement with Doubleday

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Doubleday edition published June 1992

Bantam edition/June 1993

Photographs without credits appear courtesy of the Walton family.

All rights reserved.

Copyright 1992 by the Estate of Samuel Moore Walton. Cover photo copyright 1989 by Louis Psihoyos/Matrix.

Cover design by Emily & Maura Design.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-18874.

ISBN 0-553-56283-5

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books,

a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster,

is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

OPM 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword

1 Learning to Value a Dollar

2 Starting on a Dime

3 Bouncing Back

4 Swimming Upstream

5 Raising a Family

6 Recruiting the Team

7 Taking the Company Public

8 Rolling Out the Formula

9 Building the Partnership

10 Stepping Back

11 Creating a Culture

12 Making the Customer Number One

13 Meeting the Competition

14 Expanding the Circles

15 Thinking Small

16 Giving Something Back

17 Running a Successful Company: Ten Rules That Worked for Me

18 Wanting to Leave a Legacy

A Postscript

Co-Author's Note

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Life has been great to me, probably better than any man has a right to expect. At home, I've been blessed with a wife and family who've stuck together and loved each other and indulged my lifelong obsession with minding the store. At work, my business life has been spent in lockstep with an incredible group of Wal-Mart associates who have put up with all my aggravation and bullheadedness and pulled together to make what once appeared truly impossible now seem expected and routine.

So first, I want to dedicate this book to Helen Robson Walton and the four fine kids she raisedwith some help along the way from the old manour sons Rob, John, and Jim, and our daughter Alice.

Then I want to dedicate it to all my partnersand I wish I could recognize every one of you individually, but we've talked over the years and you know how I feel about youand to all 400,000 of my associate-partners who've made this wild, wild Wal-Mart ride so much fun and so special. Much of this book is really your story.

Earlier on, there were fewer of us. Jackie Lancaster, our first floor manager in Newport, Arkansas. Inez Threet, Ruby Turner, Wanda Wiseman, Ruth Kellermy first four associates when we opened Walton's Five and Dime in Bentonville on August 1, 1951. What would we have done without those early managers? Most of them risked so much by leaving good jobs with much larger variety chains to join up with a one-horse outfit run by an overactive dreamer down in Bentonvillepeople like Clarence Leis, Willard Walker, Charlie Baum, Ron Loveless, Bob Bogle, Claude Harris, Ferold Arend, Charlie Cate, Al Miles, Thomas Jefferson, Gary Reinboth. There was Bob Thornton, Darwin Smith, Jim Henry, Phil Green, and Don Whitaker. And I can't forget Ray Thomas, Jim Dismore, Jim Elliott, or John Hawks. Ron Mayer made special contributions, and Jack Shewmaker had as much to do with making Wal-Mart a great company as anybody. John Tate has provided valuable counsel all along the way.

Of course, Wal-Mart wouldn't be what it is today without a host of fine competitors, most especially Harry Cunningham of Kmart, who really designed and built the first discount store as we know it today, and who, in my opinion, should be remembered as one of the leading retailers of all time.

Still, I think I'll hold on to my Wal-Mart stock, knowing that David Glass is at the wheel, steering a great team: Don Soderquist, Paul Carter, and A. L. Johnson. And when I think about young guys like Bill Fields and Dean Sanders and Joe Hardin running huge parts of the company, I know that one day they'll put us all to shame.

Of course, my number-one retail partner from our third store on has been my brother, James L. "Bud" Walton, who has a few things of his own to say about me in this booknot all of them flattering. Bud's wise counsel and guidance kept us from many a mistake. My nature has always been to charge, to say let's do it now. Often, Bud would advise taking a different direction, or maybe changing the timing. I soon learned to listen to him because he has exceptional judgment and a great deal of common sense.

Finally, I hope there's a special place in heaven reserved for my two secretaries, Loretta Boss, who was with me for twenty-five years, and Becky Elliott, who's been with me now for three years. They deserve it after what they've put up with here on earth.

SAMUEL MOORE WALTON Bentonville, Arkansas

FOREWORD

Hello, friends, I'm Sam Walton, founder and chairman of Wal-Mart Stores. By now I hope you've shopped in one of our stores, or maybe bought some stock in our company. If you have, you probably already know how proud I am of what is simply the miracle that all these Wal-Mart associates of mine have accomplished in the thirty years since we opened our first Wal-Mart here in northwest Arkansas, which Wal-Mart and I still call home. As hard as it is to believe sometimes, we've grown from that one little store into what is now the largest retailing outfit in the world. And we've really had a heck of a time along the way. I realize we have been through something amazing here at Wal-Mart, something special that we ought to share more of with all the folks who've been so loyal to our stores and to our company. That's one thing we never did much of while we were building Wal-Mart, talk about ourselves or do a whole lot of bragging outside the Wal-Mart familyexcept when we had to convince some banker or some Wall Street financier that we intended to amount to something someday, that we were worth taking a chance on. When folks have asked me, "How did Wal-Mart do it?" I've usually been flip about answering them. "Friend, we just got after it and stayed after it," I'd say. We have always pretty much kept to ourselves, and we've had good reasons for it; we've been very protective of our business dealings and our home lives, and we still like it that way.

But as a result, a whole lot of misinformation and myth and half-truths have gotten around over the years about me and about Wal-Mart. And I think there's been way too much attention paid to my personal finances, attention that has caused me and my family a lot of extra trouble in our livesthough I've just ignored it and pretty much gone about my life and the business of Wal-Mart as best I could.

None of this has really changed. But I've been fighting cancer for a while now, and I'm not getting any younger anyway. And lately a lot of folksincluding Helen and the kids, some of our executives here at the company, and even some of the associates in our stores have been fussing at me that I'm really the best person to tell the Wal-Mart tale, and thatlike it or notmy life is all wrapped up in Wal-Mart, and I should get it down right while I still can. So I'm going to try to tell this story the best I'm able to, as close to the way it all came about as I can, and I hope it will be almost as interesting and fun and exciting as it's been for all of us, and that it can capture for you at least something of the spirit we've all felt in building this company. More than anything, though, I want to get across once and for all just how important Wal-Mart's associates have been to its success.