Sam Walton

Childhood

…a lot of my attitude toward money stems from growing up during a pretty hardscrabble time in our country’s history: the Great Depression. And this heartland area we come from out here—Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas—was hard hit during that Dust Bowl era.

Much like Mrs. B and many others, when you grow up in poverty, those habits never leave you.

My dad, Thomas Gibson Walton, was an awfully hard worker who got up early, put in long hours, and was honest. Completely, totally honest, remembered by most people for his integrity.

[sic]

And he was the best negotiator I ever ran into. My dad had that unusual instinct to know how far he could go with someone—and did it in a way that he and the guy always parted friends—but he would embarrass me with some of the offers he would make, they were so low. That’s one reason I’m probably not the best negotiator in the world; I lack the ability to squeeze that last dollar. Fortunately, my brother Bud, who has been my partner from early on, inherited my dad’s ability to negotiate.

His father is his childhood hero.

…he had to repossess hundreds of farms from wonderful people whose families had owned the land forever. I traveled with him some, and it was tragic, and really hard on Dad too—but he tried to do it in a way that left those farmers with as much of their self-respect as he could. All of this must have made an impression on me as a kid, although I don’t ever remember saying anything to myself like “I’ll never be poor.” We never thought of ourselves as poor, although we certainly didn’t have much of what you’d call disposable income lying around, and we did what we could to raise a dollar here and there.

This had to be an incredibly difficult thing to witness growing up. I can’t imagine his father was the most popular guy, but someone had to do this job.

I learned from a very early age that it was important for us kids to help provide for the home, to be contributors rather than just takers. In the process, of course, we learned how much hard work it took to get your hands on a dollar, and that when you did it was worth something. One thing my mother and dad shared completely was their approach to money: they just didn’t spend it.

Reading more about entrepreneurs, almost all of them learn the value of work ethic at a very young age. I’m definitely going to take this to my own children. This whole villainizing of child labor seems very foolish. Yes, obviously don’t send them to the coal mines. But having them work in the family business and learn from the parents is just obviously the right thing to do.

“People can’t understand why we’re still so conservative. They make a big deal about Sam being a billionaire and driving an old pickup truck or buying his clothes at Wal-Mart or refusing to fly first class. “It’s just the way we were brought up. “When a penny is lying out there on the street, how many people would go out there and pick it up? I’ll bet I would. And I know Sam would.”

Yup, those habits never leave.

My competitive nature was such that I saw his success and admired it. I didn’t envy it. I admired it. I said to myself: maybe I will be as successful as he is someday.

As Charlie Munger says, envy, not greed, runs the world. Fortunately, Sam Walton is genuinely just greedy. It’s the envious snakes that you need to rid from your life.

We still own 38 percent of the company’s stock today, which is an unusually large stake for anyone to hold in an outfit the size of Wal-Mart, and that’s the best protection there is against the takeover raiders. It’s something that any family who has faith in its strength as a unit and in the growth potential of its business can do.

Very similar to how much the Lauder family owns of Estée Lauder.

“It was great moneywise, but there was another aspect to it: the relationship that was established among the children and with the family. It developed their sense of responsibility toward one another. You just can’t beat that.”

A family business is really a great thing. When done right, it keeps the generations together. It teaches them vital lessons about money. And it makes them better human beings.

…as long as I have anything to do with it—and I’m confident this attitude will last at least another generation—most of that Wal-Mart stock is staying right where it is. We don’t need the money. We don’t need to buy a yacht. And thank goodness we never thought we had to go out and buy anything like an island.

I love his philosophy.

One of the real reasons I’m writing this book is so my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read it years from now and know this: If you start any of that foolishness, I’ll come back and haunt you. So don’t even think about it.

Written near the end of his life. A perfect summary of his personality.

Frugality

We’re not ashamed of having money, but I just don’t believe a big showy lifestyle is appropriate for anywhere, least of all here in Bentonville where folks work hard for their money and where we all know that everyone puts on their trousers one leg at a time.

I completely agree with this. In recent times, the anti-billionaire sentiment has swung so far around that people are compelled to feel embarassed for being wealthy. This is the height of foolishness.

I still can’t believe it was news that I get my hair cut at the barbershop. Where else would I get it cut? Why do I drive a pickup truck? What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?

Love it.

…when it comes to Wal-Mart, there’s no two ways about it: I’m cheap. I think it’s a real statement that Wal-Mart never bought a jet until after we were approaching $40 billion in sales and expanded as far away as California and Maine, and even then they had to practically tie me up and hold me down to do it. On the road, we sleep two to a room, although as I’ve gotten older I have finally started staying in my own room. We stay in Holiday Inns and Ramada Inns and Days Inns, and we eat a lot at family restaurants—when we have time to eat. 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. It’s one of the main things wrong with American business today.

[sic]

I remember one time in Chicago when we stayed eight of us to a room. And the room wasn’t very big to begin with. You might say we were on a pretty restricted budget.”

Eight to a room! He is ferociously frugal. Nearly all of the greats are.

We exist to provide value to our customers, which means that in addition to quality and service, we have to save them money. 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.

I love this mentality.

Competitiveness

I don’t know what causes a person to be ambitious, but it is a fact that I have been overblessed with drive and ambition from the time I hit the ground…

He has one of the greatest drives to win in any human I’ve read about.

I was so competitive that when I started Boy Scouts in Marshall I made a bet with the other guys about which one of us would be the first to reach the rank of Eagle. Before I made Eagle in Marshall, we had moved to the little town of Shelbina, Missouri—population maybe 1,500—but I won the bet; I got my Eagle at age thirteen—the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of the state of Missouri at that time.

Most of the greats are like this.

This is hard to believe, but it’s true: in my whole life I never played in a losing football game.

Okay I get that, but it also might help that you never had to play against African Americas, Sam.

I think that record had an important effect on me. It taught me to expect to win, to go into tough challenges always planning to come out victorious. Later on in life, I think Kmart, or whatever competition we were facing, just became Jeff City High School, the team we played for the state championship in 1935. It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yup.

I never seriously considered retail in those days. In fact, I was sure I was going to be an insurance salesman. I had a high school girlfriend whose father was a very successful salesman for General American Life Insurance Company, and I had talked to him about his business. It appeared to me that he was making all the money in the world.

[sic]

…as college wound down, I realized that even if I kept up the same kind of work routine I’d had all through college, I still wouldn’t have the money to go to Wharton. So I decided to cash in what chips I already had…

Insane! The greatest retailer of all time wanted to get an MBA at Wharton! The very MBAs he looks down on.

Now I realize the simple truth: I got into retailing because I was tired and I wanted a real job.

Funny how life happens sometimes.

But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning, and I still love it today.

Yup.

“Walton,” Blake would say to me when he came to Des Moines, “I’d fire you if you weren’t such a good salesman. Maybe you’re just not cut out for retail.”

Imagine saying this to the greatest (maybe second?) retailer of all time.

…the icing on the cake was when James Cash Penney himself visited the store one day. He didn’t get around to his stores as often as I would later on, but he did get around. 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.

1. I did not know that J.C. Penny stood for James Cash. That is amazing.

2. Even JC Penny is frugal - nearly every retailer is.

Retail

“Sam, we’ve been married two years and we’ve moved sixteen times. Now, I’ll go with you any place you want so long as you don’t ask me to live in a big city. Ten thousand people is enough for me.”

By the mandate of Sam’s wife, they ended up moving to a small town. This mandate would shape the business strategy of Walmart for decades. It’s the entire reason they win.

If you know anything at all about the initial small-town strategy that got Wal-Mart going almost two decades later, you can see that this pretty much set the course for what was to come. She also said no partnerships; they were too risky. Her family had seen some partnerships go sour, and she was dead-set in the notion that the only way to go was to work for yourself.

Her family is quite business-savvy, and he leans on the advice of his father-in-law a lot.

I realize now that I was the sucker Butler Brothers sent to save him. I was twenty-seven years old and full of confidence, but I didn’t know the first thing about how to evaluate a proposition like this so I jumped right in with both feet. I bought it for $25,000—$5,000 of our own money and $20,000 borrowed from Helen’s father. My naïveté about contracts and such would later come back to haunt me in a big way.

Often, it’s better to be naive and optimistic than wise and cynical.

I’ve always believed in goals, so I set myself one: I wanted my little Newport store to be the best, most profitable variety store in Arkansas within five years. I felt I had the talent to do it, that it could be done, and why not go for it? Set that as a goal and see if you can’t achieve it. If it doesn’t work, you’ve had fun trying.

[sic]

It was a real blessing for me to be so green and ignorant, because it was from that experience that 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.

Yup - if you knew in the beginning how hard it would be, you probably wouldn’t even start. But fortunately often you have no idea.

I went along and ran my store by their book because I really didn’t know any better. But it didn’t take me long to start experimenting—that’s just the way I am and always have been.

[sic]

…it drove the Ben Franklin folks crazy. Not only were they not getting their percentages, they couldn’t compete with the prices I was buying at.

So he starts a franchise of the Ben Franklin stores, but like any great entrepreneur, he is unemployable. He simply cannot - and will not - do as he’s told blinly. He wants to figure stuff out for himself.

…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 by pricing it at $1.20. I might make only half the profit per item, but because I was selling three times as many, the overall profit was much greater. Simple enough. But this is really the essence of discounting: by cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail price than you would have by selling the item at the higher price. In retailer language, you can lower your markup but earn more because of the increased volume.

Remember that this was not known at the time! Today we take it as a matter of course, but it was not obvious to everyone that discounting was a way to improve profits, not just revenue! If the volume sold increased by more than the discount rate, enough to compensate for the loss in margin, this was actually a net profit. He, along with Sol Price (Costco) and Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA) is one of the first people to discover this.

I hustled down to Hot Springs, to find the landlady of that Kroger building. Somehow, I convinced her to give me the lease, instead of giving it to Sterling. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do with it, but I sure knew I didn’t want Sterling to have it.

[sic]

…the Ben Franklin was doing really well. The Eagle never made much money, but I figured I’d rather have a small profit than have my competitor over there in a big store.

Rather have lower margins than a competitor next to you. Smart move.

…my five years in Newport were about up, and I had met my goal. That little Ben Franklin store was doing $250,000 in sales a year, and turning $30,000 to $40,000 a year in profit. It was the number-one Ben Franklin store—for sales or profit—not only in Arkansas, but in the whole six-state region. It was the largest variety store of any sort in Arkansas, and I don’t believe there was a bigger one in the three or four neighboring states.

Notice how he’s immediately successful at retail. Yes, it’s only one store, and it’s small, but he’s nailed the fundamental basics.

I blamed myself for ever getting suckered into such an awful lease, and I was furious at the landlord. Helen, just settling in with a brand-new family of four, was heartsick at the prospect of leaving Newport. But that’s what we were going to do. I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses, and I didn’t do so then. It’s not just a corny saying that you can make a positive out of most any negative if you work at it hard enough. I’ve always thought of problems as challenges, and this one wasn’t any different.

In the end, Ben Franklin owned the store. And like every great entrepreneur, he is kicked out of his own store and loses it. This happened to Dyson, Ray Kroc, and Bill Rosenberg. And like all of them, it’s the start of something greater.

Working for Yourself

…one day Helen’s father and I drove into Bentonville and had a look around the square. It was the smallest of the towns we considered, and it already had three variety stores, when one would have been enough. Still, I love competition, and it just struck me as the right place to prove I could do it all over again.

Reminds me of NVIDIA starting out; there were already 35 other graphics companies, and they would be the 36th. If yours is an execution play, I’m not sure competition matters all that much.

…when Charlie and I laid out that store in Bentonville it became only the third self-service variety store in the whole country and the first in our eight-state area. Maybe nobody here knew it, but it was a big deal.

This is a huge innovation - remember that for the longest time, stores used to be like those old western movies. You walk in and ask for stuff, and the shop keeper goes and gets things for you. You don’t get to walk around and examine the goods. Self-service was still new. Sam immediately sees it’s better and adopts it.

This was the beginning of our way of operating for a long while to come. We were innovating, experimenting, and expanding. Somehow over the years, folks have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was something I dreamed up out of the blue as a middle-aged man, and that it was just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. It’s true that I was forty-four when we opened our first Wal-Mart in 1962, but the store was totally an outgrowth of everything we’d been doing since Newport—another case of me being unable to leave well enough alone, another experiment. And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.

Remember he’s forty-four years old when he starts Walmart. The whole time he’s honing his craft.

…the Hula Hoop fad hit real big, and they were flooding the big-city stores. But the genuine articles, which were made of plastic hose, were pricey and hard for us to get. Jim Dodson—the fellow who wouldn’t sell me the Siloam Springs store—called me and said he knew a manufacturer who could make hose the same size as the Hula Hoop’s. He thought we should go in fifty-fifty and make our own Hula Hoops. We did. We made them up in his attic, and sold a ton of them at his stores and mine. Every kid in northwest Arkansas had to have one. Later Jim ended up managing a Wal-Mart for us up in Columbia, Missouri, for about fifteen years.

This is the first big fad and Walton’s first big hit.

He called me later and said he hadn’t bought that particular plane, but he’d gone to Oklahoma City and bought this Air Coupe for $1,850, and I had to come see it. I’ll never forget going out to the Bentonville airport and seeing what he called an airplane. It had a washing machine motor in it, and it would putt-putt, and then miss a lick, then putt-putt again. It didn’t even look like an airplane, and I wouldn’t go near it for at least two years.

Walton buys a terrible looking airplane, and this quote is from his brother Bud. (Walton continually says it’s a fine plane, but he legitimately almost dies in this this. Bud is right.)

Whatever money we made in one store, we’d put it in another new one, and just keep on going.

[sic]

In fifteen years’ time, we had become the largest independent variety store operator in the United States. But the business itself seemed a little limited. The volume was so little per store that it really didn’t amount to that much. I mean, after fifteen years—in 1960—we were only doing $1.4 million in fifteen stores. By now, you know me. I began looking around hard for whatever new idea would break us over into something with a little better payoff for all our efforts.

Now the formula starts to work, so it’s time to expand.

We knew we had to act. [Sol Price] was the only one discounting out this way, and, because I had made all those trips back East, I was probably one of the few out here who understood what he was up to. By then, I knew the discount idea was the future.

Note that he hadn’t really gone all-in on discounting yet, even though he was dipping his toes into it. It was Sol Price that was the true visionary. He went all in, and Sam recognizes Sol’s genius. This is when he decides to copy PriceMart (Sol Price’s company) and found Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart

Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker—whom I had hired to manage the store from a TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas—put in 2 percent, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could have alone. We pledged houses and property, everything we had. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt. We were about to go into the discount business for real now.

Every obvious success today was, in its day, a contrarian position. Most people were unsure about the first Walmart.

‘To begin with, there’s not as many letters to buy.’ I had bought the letters that said ‘Ben Franklin,’ and I knew how much it cost to put them up and to light them and repair the neon, so I said, ‘This is just seven letters.’

Hilarious. They decided the name because it was cheaper to illuminate in lighting.

On July 2, 1962, we finally opened Wal-Mart No. 1, and not everybody was happy about it.

Sam Walon is 44 years old.

The store was only 12,000 square feet, and had an 8-foot ceiling and a concrete floor, with bare-boned wooden plank fixtures. Sterling had a huge variety store in downtown Harrison, with tile on the floor, nice lights, really good fixtures, and good presentations. Ours was just barely put together—highly promotional, truly ugly, heavy with merchandise—but for 20 percent less than the competition. We were trying to find out if customers in a town of 6,000 people would come to our kind of a barn and buy the same merchandise strictly because of price. The answer was yes. We found out they did, and they wanted it. Today, we have a 90,000-square-foot store in Harrison.

Again, this was an experiment. They still weren’t sure if people would really come all the way out to the boondocks for a good deal. Would discounting at this level even be profitable? Too many unknowns.

But now Gibson’s and other folks were beginning to look at the smaller towns and say, “Hey, maybe there is something out there that we ought to look into.” We figured we’d better roll the stores out just as quickly as we could.

Just like Walton copied Price, once they see the success of Walmart, others are going to jump in and try to take a piece of your business.

They thought Wal-Mart was just another one of Sam Walton’s crazy ideas. It was totally unproven at the time, but it was really what we’d been doing all along: experimenting, trying to do something different, educating ourselves as to what was going on in the retail industry and trying to stay ahead of those trends. This is a big contradiction in my makeup that I don’t completely understand to this day. In many of my core values—things like church and family and civic leadership and even politics—I’m a pretty conservative guy. But for some reason in business, I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been.

Yup, it was a contrarian bet in the beginning.

…in those days we did not have anywhere near the emphasis on quality that we have today. What we were obsessed with was keeping our prices below everybody else’s. Our dedication to that idea was total.

There’s only 2 business strategies: differentiation and domination. If you’re going for differentiation, you must have quality. No way around it. But if you’re going for domination, then you’re just an operations and execution play. You don’t need to have quality. You can’t be bad quality, you just need to be average. But with significantly lower prices.

Sam wouldn’t let us hedge on a price at all. Say the list price was $1.98, but we had only paid 50 cents. Initially, I would say, ‘Well, it’s originally $1.98, so why don’t we sell it for $1.25?’ And he’d say, ‘No. We paid 50 cents for it. Mark it up 30 percent, and that’s it. No matter what you pay for it, if we get a great deal, pass it on to the customer.’

Exactly what Costco and Sol Price do. Only 11% markup.

…we had very little capacity for embarrassment back in those days. We paid absolutely no attention whatsoever to the way things were supposed to be done, you know, the way the rules of retail said it had to be done.

You must have a willingness to be misunderstood. This is vital.

“We never finished up until about twelve-thirty at night, and we’d all go out for a beer except Mr. Walton. He’d say, ‘I’ll meet you for breakfast at six o’clock.’ And we’d say, ‘Mr. Walton, there’s no reason to meet that early. We can’t even get into the buildings that early.’ And he’d just say, ‘We’ll find something to do.’ “The next morning he would talk some janitor or somebody into letting us in the building, and we’d be sitting there outside the showroom when those folks started coming in to work. Like I said, I think he was trying to make a point: just because we’re in New York doesn’t mean we have to start doing things their way.”

Love this. Keep to the small-town work ethic. Don’t let the big city life change who you are.

…what they say is true. I was visiting stores all the time, and I still do it today. In fact, we’ve visited them all over the world, and gotten some great ideas that way—as well as a few that didn’t work out so well. Like working weekends, it’s just something you have to do if you want to be successful in the retail business.

This man is obsessed. Anytime he takes a vaction, he must visit the nearest Walmart. It’s a compunction.

…when folks saw me walking around scribbling notes on my coffee-stained yellow legal pad, or hauling boxes of ladies’ lingerie into the stores out of my station wagon, maybe they didn’t take me that seriously. They assumed we couldn’t be in it for the long haul. Some folks no doubt figured we were a little fly-by-night—you know, in the discount business today but out selling cars or swampland tomorrow. I think that misunderstanding worked to our advantage for a long time, and enabled Wal-Mart to fly under everybody’s radar until we were too far along to catch.

Don’t have a huge ego. You see this in every great endeavor - you must be willing to be misunderstood!

I made friends with Sol’s son-in-law, who was running a distribution center in Houston, and talking with him helped me sort out some of my thinking on distribution—which would eventually become another key to Wal-Mart’s success. I guess I’ve stolen—I actually prefer the word “borrowed”—as many ideas from Sol Price as from anybody else in the business.

This book really just increased my appreciation for Sol Price. Absolute mastermind of retail, more than anyone.

I really liked Sol’s Fed-Mart name so I latched right on to Wal-Mart. I do not believe Kmart existed at that time.

Lol.

…of the top 100 discounters who were in business in 1976, 76 of them have disappeared. Many of these started with more capital and visibility than we did, in larger cities with much greater opportunities. They were bright stars for a moment, and then they faded. I started thinking about what really brought them down, and why we kept going. It all boils down to not taking care of their customers, not minding their stores, not having folks in their stores with good attitudes, and that was because they never really even tried to take care of their own people. If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart’s success.

This is why I have no sympathy for people who whine about how Walmart is putting local stores out of business. These local operators were arrogant, terrible business people who did not care about their customers. Then you have an ultra competitive, ultra efficient operator like Sam Walton who comes in and destroys them. What right do they have to exist? Customers vote with their feet, and they chose Sam - even though at the time there were far bigger players than him!

…these early guys were very egotistical people who loved to drive big Cadillacs and fly around in their jets and vacation on their yachts, and some of them lived in houses like I’d never even thought about before. I remember going to dinner at one of their houses, and we got picked up by this limousine that must have had room for fourteen people. Man, they were living high. And they could afford to back then because this discounting thing was working so well.

Exactly. Who am I supposed to have sympathy for?

As these big operators became more organized, the competition grew a lot more difficult. That’s when all those guys who were failing to meet their customers’ needs and who didn’t build strong organizations—all those promoters—started to fall apart and, eventually, fall out.

Good riddance.

I probably visited more headquarters offices of more discounters than anybody else—ever. I would just show up and say, “Hi, I’m Sam Walton from Bentonville, Arkansas. We’ve got a few stores out there, and I’d like to visit with Mr. So-and-So”—whoever the head of the company was—“about his business.” And as often as not, they’d let me in, maybe out of curiosity, and I’d ask lots of questions about pricing and distribution, whatever. I learned a lot that way.

Yup. He’s constantly scoping out the competition.

“So I look at it, and I say, ‘What are you doing wrong? Sam—if I may call you Sam—I’ll tell you what you are doing wrong.’ I handed back his papers and I closed his attaché case, and I said to him, ‘Being here is wrong, Sam. Don’t unpack your bags. Go down, catch a cab, go back to the airport and go back to where you came from and keep doing exactly what you are doing. There is nothing that can possibly improve what you are doing. You are a genius.’ That’s how I met Sam Walton.”

This scene is too funny. He decides computers are going to be a huge deal, even in the 1960s. So he goes all the way to Poughkeepsie, New York to attend the IBM school for retailers. And he’s just thoroughly confused. He doesn’t really understand anything, so he asks for help. And when he reveals the numbers he’s doing, the instructor is so shocked that he just tells Sam go back and keep doing what yuo’re oing. Fuck the computer shit.

“Our system was rudimentary by today’s standards, but it was very advanced for the 1960s.

Yup. People don’t respect Walmart today (especially in Silicon Valley) but at the time they were the most technologically advanced retailer.

…the man’s a genius. He realized—even at the rudimentary level he was on in 1966, operating those few stores that he had—that he couldn’t expand beyond that horizon unless he had the ability to capture this information on paper so that he could control his operations, no matter where they might be. He became, really, the best utilizer of information to control absentee ownerships that there’s ever been. Which gave him the ability to open as many stores as he opens, and run them as well as he runs them, and to be as profitable as he makes them.

[sic]

…he was absolutely in the right place at the right time. There were no such things in those days as minicomputers and microcomputers. He was really ten years away from the computer world coming. But he was preparing himself. And this is a very important point: without the computer, Sam Walton could not have done what he’s done.

Walmart is actually one of the first to set up mainframes in their stores.

…the market recovered some, and on October 1, 1970, Wal-Mart became a public company, traded over the counter. Our prospectus offered 300,000 shares at a price of $15, but it sold for $16.50. It was well received, though not widely held; we only had about 800 shareholders, most of them either institutions or folks we knew.

[sic]

Just fifteen years ago, the market value of the company was around $135 million; today it’s over $50 billion.

Incredible value to be found in public markets. Still true even today.

…we really did have to go to greater lengths than most companies to let Wall Street get to know us and understand us. Partly that was because we operated so differently from everybody else, and partly it was because we were so isolated from New York…

Fuck em, Sam. That’s on them if they can’t understand it.

…what’s annoying to executives—to anybody who tries to spend their time managing a company as big as this—is these money managers who’re always churning their investors’ accounts. You know, the stock will get to $40 or $42, and they’ll rush in there and say, “Hey, let’s sell this thing because it’s just too high. It’s an overvalued stock.” Well, to my mind, that doesn’t make much sense. As long as we’re managing our company well, as long as we take care of our people and our customers, keep our eye on those fundamentals, we are going to be successful.

It’s almost as if Buffett is writing this book.

As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.

Exactly this. Some analyst somewhere makes up an expectation that you’re doomed if you don’t grow 20%, and somehow you’re going to let them dictate your future? Fuck that.

If we fail to live up to somebody’s hypothetical projection for what we should be doing, I don’t care. It may knock our stock back a little, but we’re in it for the long run. We couldn’t care less about what is forecast or what the market says we ought to do. If we listened very seriously to that sort of stuff, we never would have gone into small-town discounting in the first place.

Yup, in the long run Walmart is going to be just fine. Keep your head down and keep working.

I moved my family, and as the van was unloading the furniture into our rented house, they called from the office and said, ‘Can you go set up this new store in Missouri?’ My wife, who had three babies and a moving van to deal with, helped me find some clothes, and I left. I didn’t see her again for two weeks. Then there was a managers’ meeting so I didn’t see her for two more weeks. It would be safe to say that in those days we all worked a minimum of sixteen hours a day.” —JACK SHEWMAKER, former president and COO of Wal-Mart…

Death marches! No great successful thing has been done without a death march of some sort!

When people want to simplify the Wal-Mart story, that’s usually how they sum up the secret of our success: “Oh, they went into small towns when nobody else would.” And a long time ago, when we were first being noticed, a lot of folks in the industry wrote us off as a bunch of country hicks who had stumbled onto this idea by a big accident.

After you win, everyone tries to roll their eyes and ascribe some obvious explanation. Where were they in the beginning, when it was a contrarian bet?

…we just started repeating what worked, stamping out stores cookie-cutter style. The only decision we had to make was what size format to put in what market. We had five different store sizes—running from about 30,000 to 60,000 square feet—and we would hardly ever pass up any market because it was too small.

[sic]

…once we started really rolling out the stores, the airplane turned into a great tool for scouting real estate. We were probably ten years ahead of most other retailers in scouting locations from the air, and we got a lot of great ones that way. From up in the air we could check out traffic flows, see which way cities and towns were growing, and evaluate the location of the competition—if there was any. Then we would develop our real estate strategy for that market.

As Charlie Munger says, find what works and keep on doing it. That is the fundamental algorithm of life.

That’s another good reason I don’t like jets. You can’t get down low enough to really tell what’s going on, the way I could in my little planes. Bud and I picked almost all our sites that way until we grew to about 120 or 130 stores.

[sic]

Until we had 500 stores, or at least 400 or so, I kept up with every real estate deal we made and got to view most locations before we signed any kind of commitment.

Now that is founder mode.

…my style as an executive has been pretty much dictated by my talents. I’ve played to my strengths and relied on others to make up for my weaknesses.

I believe all the best people do this. Leverage your strengths super deeply and ignore the weaknesses.

…one of my talents is remembering numbers. I can’t recall names and a lot of other things as well as I would like to. But numbers just stick with me, and always have. That’s why I come in every Saturday morning usually around two or three, and go through all the weekly numbers.

This reminds me of Ingvar Kamprad’s “dawn raids”. He’d show up at 5 in the morning and watch the goods be unloaded while he grilled them about various things.

I do this with each store every Saturday morning. It usually takes about three hours, but when I’m done I have as good a feel for what’s going on in the company as anybody here—maybe better on some days.

Insane. Every Saturday he gets to work at 3am! Wow.

Four-thirty wouldn’t be all that unusual a time for me to get started down at the office. That early morning time is tremendously valuable: it’s uninterrupted time when I think and plan and sort things out.

Love it. I kind of want to adopt this schedule.

For twenty years back East, they always said Wal-Mart never had any competition, and that we wouldn’t know what to do with it when it hit us. They forgot that we had come out of the variety store business, and that the heartland was the home ground for practically all the regional variety chains that developed in the U.S. In our Ben Franklin days, we had all the competition you could ever want from Sterling and TG&Y and Kuhns and all those other regionals. So while we may not have had any competition for discounting in those little towns, we weren’t strangers to competition.

Underestimated at every turn because they were down in Arkansas.

…most of these guys already had distribution centers and systems in place, while we had to build one from scratch. So on paper we really didn’t stand a chance. What happened was that they didn’t really commit to discounting. They held on to their old variety store concepts too long. They were so accustomed to getting their 45 percent markup, they never let go. It was hard for them to take a blouse they’d been selling for $8.00, and sell it for $5.00, and only make 30 percent. With our low costs, our low expense structures, and our low prices, we were ending an era in the heartland. We shut the door on variety store thinking.

Imagine a 45% markup! That is what you’re defending while you demonize Walmart.

“But if you ask Sam how’s business, he’s never satisfied. He says, ‘Bernie, things are really lousy. Our lines are too long at the cash registers. Our people aren’t being helpful enough. I don’t know what we’re gonna do to get them motivated.’ Then you ask some of these CEOs from other retail organizations who you know are on the verge of going out of business, and they brag and tell you how great everything is. Really putting on airs. Not Sam. He is down to earth and knows who he is.

The greatest founders are never satisfied!

Bentonville appealed to me because I could hunt quail seasons in four states. So during the season, I usually took off almost every day around three or four in the afternoon and went out to do a couple of hours’ hunting.

This guy lives for quail hunting. Quail hunting and retailing.

“One time Sam and I got invited to a fancy quail hunt on one of those south Georgia plantations. They told us they’d pick us up at this landing strip. So we flew in there, and there were all these corporate jets lined up. Well, this guy in a Mercedes pulls up to get us. You should’ve seen the look on his face when Sam opened up the back of that plane, and his five dogs came flyin’ out of there. They weren’t expecting anybody to bring their own dogs. They had to haul them in that Mercedes.”

LOL.

Transition

I really felt at the time that Ron was absolutely essential to the company’s future. In addition to his ability, he had a lot of ambition. He made it pretty well known that his goal, which I respected, was to run a company, preferably Wal-Mart. He told me one day that if he couldn’t run our company, he wanted to get out and run another one. So I thought about that for a few days, and I really worried that we were going to lose Ron. Then I said to myself, “Well, I’m getting pretty old, and we could probably work together. I’ll let him be chairman and CEO, and I’ll just enjoy myself, step back a little, and, of course, continue to visit stores.” So I became chairman of the Executive Committee. Ron became chairman and CEO of the company. Ferold became president. I moved out of my office down at the end of what they jokingly call “executive row,” and let Ron have it. I moved into his office. I made up my mind to stay out of his way and let him run the company, telling myself that I would just check to see how he was getting along. Since I had really been letting other people operate the company day to day all along, I thought things would run real well this way. Well, I was no more ready to retire in 1974 at the age of fifty-six than the Arkansas sun is ready to start rising out of Oklahoma in the morning.

If this feels almost exactly like Bill Rosenberg, it is. Sure, Ron wasn’t his son, but the rest of the story is basically identical. Fortunately, unlike Bill, Sam does not let this mistake go on for too long.

Actually, I knew it was a mistake almost right after I resigned the chairmanship. I tried to stay out of Ron’s way. The problem was that I actually just kept doing exactly the same thing I had been doing all the time. I wanted to see my ideas keep flowing around the company, but I wanted Ron to be successful in operating the company and building an organization. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t quite stay away from it to that degree. The situation was quite a burden for Ron, and would have been for any forty-year-old guy wanting to run his own company, I think.

He can’t step aside, and why should he? He is the greatest. Sorry Ron, but you need to start your own thing.

In company lore, that incident became known as the “Saturday night massacre.” What followed became known as “the exodus.” First, a whole group of senior managers who had been part of Ron’s team—our financial officer, our data processing manager, the guy who was running our distribution centers—all walked out behind him. You can imagine how Wall Street felt about that.

Oof.

…when I named him to be executive v.p. of operations, personnel, and merchandise—passing over some folks who were older and had been with us longer—a bunch more of our managers left. It was a real, bona fide exodus, and by the time it was over, I’ll bet one third of our senior management was gone. For the first time in a long time, things looked pretty grim. And at that point, I have to admit I wasn’t sure myself that we could just keep on going like before.

[sic]

…this setback presented us with one of the great opportunities in our company’s history. Ever since David Glass and I had met at that awful Wal-Mart opening in Harrison, Arkansas, I had been trying to somehow persuade him to work for us. He was a big deal at this discount drug chain up in Springfield, and I was convinced he was one of the finest retail talents I had met. For some time, I had been after Ron Mayer to hire David, but he wouldn’t do it. So when Ron left, David was the first person I went to see, and I finally talked him into coming to Wal-Mart.

Over and over, I keep finding that the greatest obstacles are usually your keys to victory.

…we just always found the folks who had the qualities that neither Bud nor I had. And they fit into the niches as the company grew. Then every so often, we needed even better talents than we sometimes had on board. And that’s when the David Glasses would come along.

[sic]

…there’s a time for all these things. I tried for almost twenty years to hire Don Soderquist away from Ben Franklin. I even offered him the presidency one time, and he didn’t come. But when we really needed him later on, he finally joined up and made a great chief operating officer for David’s team.

[sic]

At any company, the time comes when some people need to move along, even if they’ve made strong contributions.

Only the founder needs to stick around. Everyone else can leave, if it really is time to go.

…it has been a very difficult thing to develop, and there’s been a lot of opposition to it, including from my own wife, who I’ve already told you believes it’s unfair to take our folks away from their families on Saturday mornings. There have definitely been times when our folks would have voted it out if we had given them the opportunity. But as I’ve said, I believe Saturday work is part of the commitment that comes with choosing a career in retail. I can’t see asking our folks in the stores to make that sacrifice while our managers are off playing golf.

Great outcomes require sacrifice. Sorry Mrs. Walton.

For many years, we lived entirely off the principle that customers in the country and in small towns are just like their relatives who left the farm and moved to the city: they want a good deal as much as anybody. When we arrived in these little towns offering low prices every day, satisfaction guaranteed, and hours that were realistic for the way people wanted to shop, we passed right by that old variety store competition, with its 45 percent markups, limited selection, and limited hours.

[sic]

…none has ever baffled me more than this idea that we are somehow the enemy of small-town America. Nothing could be further from the truth: Wal-Mart has actually kept quite a number of small towns from becoming practically extinct by offering low prices and saving literally billions of dollars for the people who live there, as well as by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in our stores. I don’t have any trouble understanding why some merchant who’s having a hard time competing with us wouldn’t be too happy about our being there. What I haven’t been able to figure at all is these people who have decided we’re somehow responsible for the decline of the small town. My guess is that a lot of these critics are folks who grew up in small towns and then deserted them for the big cities decades ago. Now when they come home for a visit, it makes them sad that the old town square isn’t exactly like it was when they left it back in 1954. It’s almost like they want their hometown to be stuck in time, an old-fashioned place filled with old-fashioned people doing business the old-fashioned way. Somehow, small-town populations weren’t supposed to move out into their own suburbs, and they weren’t supposed to go out to the intersections of highways and build malls with lots of free parking.

I completely agree with this. The demonization of WalMart in recent years is astonishingly foolish. It’s easy to hate on a faceless, nameless corporation. But when you read the founding stories of these companies and the ideals that in large part still guide them to this day, it’s obvious the enormous value they are providing to America and humanity.

When you start out as an unknown quantity with just a dream and a commitment, you couldn’t buy a mention of your company in one of these publications. When you become moderately successful, they still ignore you unless something bad happens to you. Then, the more successful you become, the more suspicious they become of you. And if you ever become a large-scale success, it’s Katie bar the door. Suddenly, you make a very convenient villain because everybody seems to love shooting at who’s on top.

Exactly this.

What happened was absolutely a necessary and inevitable evolution in retailing, as inevitable as the replacement of the buggy by the car and the disappearance of the buggy whip makers. 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.

If not Walmart, then someone was going to do this (likely Sol Price). You can demonize them and pretend it wasn’t going to happen, but history moves on.

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.

Yes. The days of yore are gone. You cannot be a shitty retailer and still expect to make 45% margins. Sorry.

…every buyer has to be tough. That’s the job. I always told the buyers: ‘You’re not negotiating for Wal-Mart, you’re negotiating for your customer. And your customer deserves the best price you can get. Don’t ever feel sorry for a vendor. He knows what he can sell for, and we want his bottom price.’ “And that’s what we did, and what Wal-Mart still does. We would tell the vendors, ‘Don’t leave in any room for a kickback because we don’t do that here. And we don’t want your advertising program or your delivery program. Our truck will pick it up at your warehouse. Now what is your best price?’ And if they told me it’s a dollar, I would say, Tine, I’ll consider it, but I’m going to go to your competitor, and if he says 90 cents, he’s going to get the business. So make sure a dollar is your best price.’ If that’s being hard-nosed, then we ought to be as hard-nosed as we can be. You have to be fair and upfront and honest, but you have to drive your bargain because you’re dealing for millions and millions of customers who expect the best price they can get. If you buy that thing for $1.25, you’ve just bought somebody else’s inefficiency.

Customer is always first!

KMart & PriceClub

Our competitors have honed and sharpened us to an edge we wouldn’t have without them. We wouldn’t be nearly as good as we are today without Kmart, and I think they would admit we’ve made them a better retailer. One reason Sears fell so far off the pace is that they wouldn’t admit for the longest time that Wal-Mart and Kmart were their real competition. They ignored both of us, and we both blew right by them.

Someday I need to read a book on Sears. Absolutely masterclass in fumbling the bag.

Kmart had interested me ever since the first store went up in 1962. I was in their stores constantly because they were the laboratory, and they were better than we were. I spent a heck of a lot of my time wandering through their stores talking to their people and trying to figure out how they did things.

He obsessed over KMart for years.

…it was right about that time that Harry Cunningham chose to retire as the CEO of Kmart, which he had founded while he was chairman of S. S. Kresge. This was a big break for us. Harry was really the guy who, in just ten years, had legitimized the discount industry and made Kmart into the model for us all…

Funny that KMart is the one who makes discounting a respectable business strategy, not Walmart.

“Kmart was opening so many stores it was regarded as the Genghis Khan of the discounting business. Sam has always been clear about his attitude: ‘Meet them head-on. Competition will make us a better company.’

Remember this! It was assumed that KMart was going to be the dominant player in the industry.

We listened to everything they had to say, and made huge adjustments based on those critiques. It helped us gear up for any competition, especially Kmart, whose attack on us was probably the best single external event in Wal-Mart’s history.

Your critics are your best friends.

“Kmart really took us on in about 1977, and I remember Little Rock particularly. They took us on there in North Little Rock, where store number 7 had been one of our better stores. They got aggressive, and we fought back. We told our manager there, ‘No matter what, don’t let them undersell you at all, on anything.’ I remember he called me one Saturday night and said, ‘You know, we have Crest toothpaste down to six cents a tube now.’ And I said, ‘Well, just keep it there and see what they do.’ They didn’t lower it any more than that, and we both just kept it at six cents. Finally, they backed off. I always thought they learned something about us at that store—that we don’t bend easy—because they never came at us with that degree of price cutting anywhere else.”

Capitalism is a beautiful thing. Imagine getting toothpaste for 6 cents a tube and being upset with this system.

We got so much better so quickly it was hard to believe. We totally stood Kmart off in those small towns of ours. Almost from the beginning, they weren’t very successful at taking our customers away in Jeff City and Poplar Bluff. Once Kmart arrived, we worked even harder at pleasing our customers, and they stayed loyal. This gave us a great surge of confidence in ourselves.

You need competition to become your best.

I’ve taken a lot of pride in the fact that our fastest expansion—the greatest growth period in the history of retail—actually came after everybody thought our goose was cooked and ready to be eaten by the Kmart folks from Detroit.

Love it.

The percentage of gross margin in this industry—really, the markup on merchandise—has dropped steadily from around 35 percent in the early sixties to only 22 percent today. Almost all of that represents increased value and savings to the customers who shop discount stores.

This is entirely due to the Walmart discounting strategy. Consumers are getting an extra 13% margin now on all goods they buy!

Suddenly, we noticed a whole new class of sub-discounter undercutting our prices, wholesalers with very low overhead who were selling at margins way below the 22 percent in the discount business—5 to 7 percent. Since “Low Prices Every Day” had brought us this far, we had to explore the business. Especially since we knew that Sol Price—one of the original discount pioneers—was behind this idea. He had started his Price Club stores in 1976.

Enter Sol Price, the mastermind.

And I admit it. I didn’t tell him at the time that I was going to copy his program, but that’s what I did.

Walton steals more from Price than anyone else. Price is really incredible.

Since we were patterned after Price Clubs, sometimes we copied them without exactly knowing what we were doing. We were bringing a West Coast idea to the Midwest, and we didn’t know how it would be received. I remember one idea that didn’t transfer too well. Price Club had a huge stack of wine in the front of its stores. We bought the same amount for our stores in the Midwest, and we learned the hard way that Midwesterners aren’t exactly wine drinkers.”

LOL. Too funny. From a purely scientific hypothesis testing perspective, it makes sense! You want to minimize the number of variables when trying an experiment, but it’s just hilarious that they brought over the exact layout on the wine rack as well.

Once I was in the big Price Club on Marino Avenue in San Diego, and I had my little tape recorder with me—like I always do—and I was making notes to myself about prices and merchandising ideas. This guy, a big guy, comes up to me and says, “I’m sorry but I’ll have to take your tape recorder and erase the material you’ve got on it. We have a policy against people using them in the stores.” Well, we have the same policy, and I knew I was caught. So I said, “I respect that. But I’ve got things on here from other stores that I don’t want to lose, so let me write a note to Robert Price”—that’s Sol’s son. So I wrote: “Robert, your guy is just too good. I was trying to get some information on this recorder about some of the items you were carrying and some of my impressions of your store, and he caught me. So here’s the tape. If you want to listen to it, you certainly have that privilege, but I have some other material on here I would like very much to have back.” So in about four days I got a nice note back from Robert, with the tape, and none of it had been blurred or scratched out. He probably treated me better than I deserved.

This is the greatest story ever. Jim Sinegal did the same for Bezos. There’s something about passing on the wisdom to the next generation of entrepreneurs (though he and Walton were of the same age).

A lot of folks in my position would have been perfectly content with the situation as it stood in 1984. Our 640 Wal-Marts were earning almost $200 million a year on sales of more than $4.5 billion, we were still growing like wildfire, and we were underway with Sam’s. But I felt like we had to make a change.

[sic]

Competition is actually the reason I love retailing so much. The Wal-Mart story is just another chapter in that history of competition—a great chapter, mind you—but it’s all part of the evolution of the industry. There’s always a challenger coming along.

This is why you want to keep the founder. Even at the highest heights, they are never satisfied. You need some force to keep pushing you.

For a long, long time, Sam would show up regularly in the drivers’ break room at 4 A.M. with a bunch of doughnuts and just sit there for a couple of hours talking to them. “He grilled them. ‘What are you seeing at the stores?’ ‘Have you been to that store lately?’ ‘How do the people act there?’ ‘Is it getting better?’ It makes sense. The drivers see more stores every week than anybody else in this company. And I think what Sam likes about them is that they’re not like a lot of managers. They don’t care who you are. They’ll tell you what they really think.”

This is exactly what Ingvar Kamprad used to do as well!

Technology

“The technology didn’t really exist to do this for a retailer in the early eighties. But we got together with the Macom & Hughes Corporation, and worked out a contract, and eventually we committed $24 million to build it. We launched it in 1983, and I mean, Sam liked to killed me the first two years. It was not an immediate success. But we got it working, and now, of course, everybody has one.”

Walmart was the first to connect all of their stores to a central database! They had to do the networking layer themselves. That is how early they were. Now, for the first time, they could track inventory across the entire country and start optimizing.

We’ve spent almost $700 million building up the current computer and satellite systems we have. I’m told it’s the largest civilian data base of its kind in the world—even bigger than AT&T’s.

This is insane. I’m very impressed.

Conclusion

…the bigger Wal-Mart gets, the more essential it is that we think small. Because that’s exactly how we have become a huge corporation—by not acting like one. Above all, we are small-town merchants, and I can’t tell you how important it is for us to remember—when we puff up our chests and brag about all those huge sales and profits—that they were all made one day at a time, one store at a time, mostly by the hard work, good attitude, and teamwork of all those hourly associates and their store managers, as well as by all those folks in the distribution centers. If we ever get carried away with how important we are because we’re a great big $50 billion chain—instead of one store in Blytheville, Arkansas, or McComb, Mississippi, or Oak Ridge, Tennessee—then you probably can close the book on us. If we ever forget that looking a customer in the eye, and greeting him or her, and asking politely if we can be of help is just as important in every Wal-Mart today as it was in that little Ben Franklin in Newport, then we just ought to go into a different business because we’ll never survive in this one.

[sic]

…thinking small is a way of life, almost an obsession. And I suspect thinking small is an approach that almost any business could profit from. The bigger you are, the more urgently you probably need it. At our size today, there’s all sorts of pressure to regiment and standardize and operate as a centrally driven chain, where everything is decided on high and passed down to the stores. In a system like that, there’s absolutely no room for creativity, no place for the maverick merchant that I was in the early days at Ben Franklin, no call for the entrepreneur or the promoter. Man, I’d hate to work at a place like that, and I worry every single day about Wal-Mart becoming that way.

This is the best articulation of this philosophy. It is a way of life. Being concerned, not complacent, takes active energy. It takes renewed willpower each and every day to stay vigilent and keep improving. But the moment you stop, you begin your slow march to death.

I can honestly say that if I had the choices to make all over again, I would make just about the same ones. Preachers are put here to minister to our souls; doctors to heal our diseases; teachers to open up our minds; and so on. Everybody has their role to play. The thing is, I am absolutely convinced that the only way we can improve one another’s quality of life, which is something very real to those of us who grew up in the Depression, is through what we call free enterprise—practiced correctly and morally.

This is the best test of a life well lived. Regrets minimized. Bezos would be proud.

The remedy we envisioned wasn’t some blind patriotic idea that preaches buying American at any cost. We, like any other retailer, will only buy American if those goods can be produced efficiently enough to offer good value. We’re not interested in charity here; we don’t believe in subsidizing substandard work or inefficiency.

[sic]

I don’t think we should counter with protectionism because it doesn’t address the real problem: the quality of our product doesn’t compete with that of the Japanese, whether we want to admit it or not.

Exactly this. A competitive person doesn’t want an unfair playing field. Let me prove I’m better. The same situation is playing out today with China.

[C]ould 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.

Less than 2 years later, Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.

At the time of the diagnosis, in early 1990, he had been working, somewhat ambivalently, on an autobiography. He canceled that project, choosing instead to spend most of his time and energy doing what he enjoyed most: flying his plane from town to town, going from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart, visiting with his beloved associates.

[sic]

Even in the final weeks of his life, he took great pleasure in doing what he had always done. One of the last people he spoke with outside the family was a local Wal-Mart manager who, at our request, dropped by to chat with Dad about his store’s sales figures for the week.

I love it. Find something you love so much that you would do it until your last breath.

…know it’s unrealistic of me to expect them all to get up and throw paper routes, and I know it’s something I can’t control. But 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. I really hope that somehow the values both Helen and I, and our kids, have always embraced can be passed on down through the generations.