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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4bde014 | 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. | Sam Walton | ||
| 20ca139 | 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." | Sam Walton | ||
| d1ce3b4 | INEZ THREET, CLERK, WALTON'S FIVE AND DIME, BENTONVILLE: "I guess Mr. Walton just had a personality that drew people in. He would yell at you from a block away, you know. He would just yell at everybody he saw, and that's the reason so many liked him and did business in the store. It was like he brought in business by his being so friendly. "He was always thinking up new things to try in the store. I remember one time he made a trip to New .. | Sam Walton | ||
| 1688b88 | Here's the thing: money never has meant that much to me, not even in the sense of keeping score. If we had enough groceries, and a nice place to live, plenty of room to keep and feed my bird dogs, a place to hunt, a place to play tennis, and the means to get the lads good educations--that's rich. | Sam Walton | ||
| a5df1d2 | I made up my mind I was going to learn something about IBM computers. So I enrolled in an IBM school for retailers in Poughkeepsie, New York. One of the speakers was a guy from the National Mass Retailers' Institute (NMRI), the discounters' trade association, a guy named Abe Marks. ABE MARKS, HEAD OF HARTFIELD ZODY'S, AND FIRST PRESIDENT, NMRI: "I was sitting there at the conference reading the paper, and I had a feeling somebody was standi.. | Sam Walton | ||
| da21e61 | repeated failure is key to doing bold things, to being entrepreneurial. Try stuff, fail, fail fast, try again. When Sam Walton was asked why Walmart was so successful, he said, "We do a lot of things right." Then asked how they did things right, he said, "Because we did them wrong the first time." | Gary Hoover | ||
| f24e585 | The point I'm trying to make is that we as a family have bent over backward not to take advantage of Wal-Mart, not to press our ownership position unfairly, and everybody in the company knows it. Alice | Sam Walton | ||
| a2e14b2 | As we moved along in the seventies, we had very definitely become an effective retail entity, and we had set the stage for the even more phenomenal growth that was going to follow. It's amazing that our competitors didn't catch on to us quicker and try harder to stop us. Whenever we put a Wal-Mart store into a town, customers would just flock to us from the variety stores. It didn't take those stores long to figure out that if they were goi.. | Sam Walton | ||
| 2d6a975 | The larger truth that I failed to see turned out to be another of those paradoxes--like the discounters' principle of the less you charge, the more you'll earn. And here it is: the more you share profits with your associates--whether it's in salaries or incentives or bonuses or stock discounts--the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the .. | Sam Walton | ||
| 83a999e | We opened one, store number 8 in Morrilton, Arkansas, that was really a sight. We rented this old Coca-Cola bottling plant. It was all broken up into five rooms, and we bought some old fixtures from a failing Gibson's store for $3,000. We hung them by baling wire from the ceiling. We had clothes hanging in layers on conduit pipe all the way to the ceiling, and shelves wired into the walls. But this was really a small, small town, so number .. | Sam Walton | ||
| 962d9c1 | Rogers had been open about a year, and everything was just piled up on tables, with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. Sam asked me to kind of group the stuff by category or department, and that's when we began our department system. The thing I remember most, though, was the way we priced goods. Merchandise would come in and we would just lay it down on the floor and get out the invoice. Sam wouldn't let us hedge on a price at all. Say the lis.. | Sam Walton | ||
| a415f03 | The basic discounter's idea was to attract customers into the store by pricing these items--toothpaste, mouthwash, headache remedies, soap, shampoo--right down at cost. Those were what the early discounters called your "image" items. That's what you pushed in your newspaper advertising--like the twenty-seven-cent Crest at Springdale--and you stacked it high in the stores to call attention to what a great deal it was. Word would get around t.. | Sam Walton | ||
| 8748891 | When you move like we did from town to town in these mostly rural areas, word of mouth gets your message out to customers pretty quickly without much advertising. | Sam Walton | ||
| fd18a8a | our main real estate effort should be directed at getting out in front of expansion and letting the population build out to us. Just like in the beginning, we start around these small towns, people drive past our stores, get to know us, and become customers. | Sam Walton | ||
| 7865391 | I've known Sam since his first store in Newport, Arkansas, and I believe that money is, in some respects, almost immaterial to him. What motivates the man is the desire to absolutely be on top of the heap. It is not money. Money drives him crazy now. His question to me at 6 A.M. not long ago was 'How do you inspire a grandchild to go to work if they know they'll never have a poor day in their life?' " DAVID" | Sam Walton | ||
| 72b9e2e | WAL-MART: "In those days, we would go on these buying trips with Sam, and we'd all stay, as much as we could, in one room or two. 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." But sometimes I'm asked why today, when Wal-Mart has been so successful, when we're a $50 billion-plus company, should we stay so cheap? That's sim.. | Sam Walton | ||
| 09e70aa | A little later on, Phil ran what became one of the most famous item promotions in our history. We sent him down to open store number 52 in Hot Springs, Arkansas--the first store we ever opened in a town that already had a Kmart. Phil got there and decided Kmart had been getting away with some pretty high prices in the absence of any discounting competition. So he worked up a detergent promotion that turned into the world's largest display e.. | Sam Walton | ||
| a32cb9e | This process of wealth creation is offensive to levelers and planners because it yields mountains of new wealth in ways that could not possibly be planned. But unpredictability is fundamental to free human enterprise. It defies every econometric model and socialist scheme. It makes no sense to most professors, who attain their positions by the systematic acquisition of credentials pleasing to the establishment above them. By definition, inn.. | George Gilder | ||
| bfc465f | Netanyahu concludes: "We agree with that clear-sighted scholar who said, unreservedly, in plain language: 'Anti-Semitism was born in Egypt.'" His book shows that motivating the Inquisition in Spain was not hostility to Jewish religion but rage against the superior effectiveness and ascendancy of Jews outperforming established clerics as Christians. "New Christians," mostly Jewish, were taking over the Spanish church by being more learned, e.. | George Gilder | ||
| bd41824 | They imagine that the plight of the Palestinians reflects not their own Marxist angst, anti-Semitic obsessions, and recidivist violence but the actions of Israel. In their view, Israel's wealth stems not from Jewish creativity and genius but from cadging aid from the United States or seizing valuable land and other resources from Arabs. | George Gilder | ||
| eff0155 | What makes capitalism succeed is not chiefly its structure of incentives but its use of knowledge and experience. | George Gilder | ||
| 7ba2672 | Under Arab rule, Palestine had always been a somnolent desert land that could have sustained no authentic twentieth-century Arab awakening. Palestine without Jews is a not a nation but a naqba. | George Gilder | ||
| ea4c846 | Disguising this edifying process in the United States are the handi-capitalists in nominally "private" institutions - from Wall Street money-shufflers and government-guaranteed mortgage hustlers to corn-state ethanol farmers and Silicon Valley solar shills - that are dependent on public handouts and mandates for their success." | George Gilder | ||
| 6402257 | Opening the book is a quotation from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that sums up the Prager-Telushkin view: "It was Judaism that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world. . . . The Jew carries the burden of God in history [and] for this has never been forgiven." | George Gilder | ||
| 517d4db | But I still don't have knowledge, interpreting the surprises that others don't know about, that will drive a new narrative. You have to work and think and stress and fret to surmise the surprises by first fathoming the pulse. | George Gilder | ||
| 8dbb52b | aphoristic posts on the Cypherpunks list, the | George Gilder | ||
| 9faf83e | It removes information from the market when I need more and more...Indexing is a waste heap--information so merged and muffled that it hides knowledge rather than reveals it. All beta, no alpha. | George Gilder | ||
| 3417107 | A day doesn't pass that I'm not surprised. | George Gilder | ||
| 6fb6ce5 | Originating in large scale electronic warfare and anti-jamming technologies for the battlefield devised by two Russian immigrants, these now one-chip systems can fit in a handset and enable intercommunication among the towers of Babel in urban America. | George Gilder | ||
| 9222449 | Yet economics purports to be strangely exempt from this fact of life. From Adam Smith's day to our own, the chief concern of the discipline has been to render economic events unsurprising...The discernment of orderly rules governing the apparent chaos of life was a remarkable achievement and continues to amaze. | George Gilder | ||
| 3fd9acb | The passion for finding the system in experience, replacing surprise with order, is a persistent part of human nature...Science came to mean the elimination of surprise. It outlawed miracles, because miracles are above all unexpected. | George Gilder | ||
| d28d276 | Ignored...was the one unbridgeable gap between physics and any such science of human behavior: the surprises that arise from free will and human creativity...they constitute the most important economic events. For a miracle is simply an innovation, a sudden and bountiful addition of information to the system. | George Gilder | ||
| dde2b5b | An economics of systems only-an economics of markets but not of men-is fatally flawed. | George Gilder | ||
| bd745b1 | The Newtonian scheme became an illusion of determinism in a tempestuous world of human actions. Economists became preoccupied with mechanical models of markets and uninterested in the willful people who inhabit them. | George Gilder | ||
| 527ac73 | Some economists became obsessed with market efficiency and others with market failure. Generally held to be members of opposite schools-"freshwater" and "saltwater," Chicago and Cambridge, liberal and conservative, Austrian and Keynesian-both sides share an essential economic vision. They see their discipline as successful insofar as it eliminates surprise-insofar, that is, as the inexorable workings of the machine override the initiatives .. | George Gilder | ||
| 17ae8b1 | The index is retrospective. The crucial alpha, the entropy, the signal modulating that linear advance...comes from knowledge of the entrepreneurial surprises harbored on the edge of the noise. | George Gilder | ||
| 9c3b52b | The war between the centrifuge of knowledge and the centripetal pull of power remains the prime conflict in all economies. Reconciling the two impulses is a new economics, an economics that puts free will and the innovating entrepreneur not on the periphery but at the center of the system. It is an economics of surprise that distributes power as it extends knowledge. It is an economics of disequilibrium and disruption that tests its inventi.. | George Gilder | ||
| a598a05 | We begin with the proposition that capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information is best defined as surprised-what we cannot predict rather than what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition of things by the pursuit of monetary rewards but the expansion of wealth through learning and discovery. | George Gilder | ||
| a57d484 | Gilder shows how, to the contrary, Israel's growing prosperity will benefit the entire region in which it is located. | George Gilder | ||
| ace06b7 | It is not only the canary in the coal mine--it is also a crucial part of the mine. | George Gilder | ||
| f01e568 | thus has been the only commodity whose future price is always equal to the spot price plus the rate of interest over the time period. A million paper dollars held since 1913, when the Federal Reserve Bank was created, would be worth $20,000 today, down 98 percent. A million dollars of gold in 1913 would now be worth $62 million. | George Gilder | ||
| 08730d6 | Could the Gazans join the Israelis to create a Riviera on their exquisite beaches, their glowing sands? To do so, they would have to leave behind a world of zero-sum chimeras and fantasies of jihadist revenge. And they would discover that their greatest ally is a man long portrayed as their most feared enemy, a man who, having led for decades the fight to liberate Israeli Jews from self-destructive socialist resentment, now offers to bring .. | George Gilder | ||
| 4739612 | The invention of reliable and recognizable timepieces--clocks and bell towers--liberated workers from the bondage of piecework, which entails regimentation to count the pieces and favors quantity over quality, slavery over free labor. | George Gilder | ||
| 5f77ba5 | mollusks"--Einstein's word for entities in a relativistic world." | George Gilder |