Sam Walton: Made in America

 In today’s episode, I dive into the life of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. It's a story of resilience, relentless hard work, and unmatched ambition. It’s also the story of man who was unapologetic about his curiosity and who outworked and outsmarted everyone to build the greatest retail empire in history. 

If you’ve ever wondered how extraordinary people like Sam Walton got their start — and how you can too — this is your front-row seat to be inspired by a life and a legacy that were built to last.

Transcript

Ambition And Early Drive

SPEAKER_00 0:08

I don't know what causes a person to be ambitious, but it is a fact that I have been overblessed by drive and ambition from the time I hit the ground. Our mother was extremely ambitious for her kids. She read a lot and loved education. Mother must have been a pretty special motivator because I took her seriously when she told me I should always try to be the best I could at whatever I took on. So I have always pursued everything I was interested in with a true passion. Some would say obsession to win. I've always held the bar pretty high for myself. I've set extremely high personal goals. That was an excerpt from the book Made in America, an autobiography of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Built to Last podcast. Built to Last is a show where I dig into the lives of history's most remarkable leaders, thinkers, trailblazers, and builders to learn not just what they achieved, but to uncover the values, convictions, character, and the foundations that were built to last and made them unforgettable. Today I'm diving into the story of Sam Walton. He was the founder of Walmart. Before Amazon dominated retail, you know, before Target was a household name, there was Walmart. And behind Walmart was a man who was obsessed with providing value, learning from his competitors, and constantly experimenting to make his business better. If you read one book this year, I really hope that Sam Walton's autobiography, Made in America, makes it on your list. I thought that every page of this book was just filled with so much wisdom, and it was really tough for me to condense it all here. So I really hope that you get to read it for yourself. It was also a very easy read, and it's not that long. From a very young age, Sam was very involved in team sports and athletics, and that remained a big part of his life from high school all the way through college. This bit of Sam Walton's life reminded me a lot of Ronald Reagan, who I did my last episode on, in that they were both very involved in just about everything. Sam got a taste for business at a very early age. As a young boy, he would sell newspaper subscriptions and run paper routes, something he continued to do all the way through college. And here I quote from the book, I wasn't what you would call a gifted student, but I worked really hard. I was a quarterback on our high school football team, which went undefeated and won the state championship. I think that record had an important effect on me. It taught me to expect to win. It never occurred to me that I might lose. To me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. I'll take a pause there because I think that is so very impactful. I know some people may hear that and say, well, what an entitled thing to say, but I don't think that's the message. I think the message is you don't take losing for an answer. You find a way to win, whatever it takes. It's not just about wishful thinking, but about working hard and being creative about how to achieve your goals. And then he says, having been the quarterback at my high school, I was already pretty well known around Columbia, Missouri, where the University of Missouri is. So my high school career just merged right into college. I was about to graduate from the University of Missouri in June of 1940 with a business degree, and I had been working probably as hard as I ever worked in my life. I had continued to throw a newspaper route all through high school and college. I added a few more routes, hired a few helpers, and turned it into a pretty good business that made about$4,000 to$5,000 a year, which at the end of the depression was fairly serious money. But now that I was about to become a college graduate, I was ready to give up this routine, really eager to get out in the world and make something of myself in a real job. Sam toyed with the idea of working more to save up money to go to Wharton, um, School of Finance in Pennsylvania, but he decided that he was better off cashing in whatever chips he had and take up a job after college. So he ended up taking a job in retailing at a JCPenney store in Des Moines, Iowa, as a management trainee. I think it's just funny that both Ron O'Reagan and Sam Walton got their career starts in Des Moines really around the same time. Sam was excellent at selling and he loved it. Um, but his handwriting was poor and that caused some issues at the cash register. And one of the managers there even told him as much as I would fire you if you weren't such a good salesman. Maybe you're just not cut out for retail. I guess he was wrong on that one. Um fortunately, Sam found a champion in his store manager, Duncan Majors. Duncan trained his trainees hard, but was also a great motivator. Sam recalls Duncan showing off his annual bonus check of$65,000, an enormous sum at the time, which made a lasting impression on the young trainees. He says, I worked for pennies about 18 months, and they were really the Cadillac of the industry. But even back then, I was checking out the competition, and at lunch, I would always go wander around the Sears and the Yonker store to see what they were up to. This is a quality of Sam that shows up throughout his life. He is just not afraid to go see what other people are up to. He was curious, he was not ashamed to check on his competition, learn from others, and copy ideas to improve himself and his business. What I also love about this story is just how natural it was for Sam to just wander. He wasn't too proud to peek into a competitor store and say, okay, what are they doing better than us? I think that curiosity and zero shame about boring good ideas is a thread that runs through his entire career. He didn't really see it as stealing. He really truly saw it as learning. And honestly, this, you know, this is very, it feels very um, this hits me very personally. I've always had this pressure in my head that I'm not coming up with something totally original. I think a lot of people do. Um, but I think, you know, this is helpful to know that ideas don't have to fall out of the sky fully formed. Um, and reading this book really made me realize that most of the progress actually comes from noticing what works, adapting it, and making it your own. You know, copying good ideas isn't, you know, it isn't lazy, it's smart. It's kind of like standing on the shoulders of giants. It's kind of like this podcast, you know, learning what it is that makes success last and how can we use that for our own lives. Um by the early 1942, um, by early 1942, World War II was on and Sam Walton was gung ho to serve. But because of a heart irregularity, he was classified for limited duty. And this really got him down in the dumb since since he was waiting to be called up by the army, he quit his pennies job and he wandered down south towards Tulsa to check out the oil business. Um, he got a job at a gunpowder plant outside Tulsa, and that's where he met his wife, his future wife, Helen Robson. Um, Helen and Sam got married in 1943, and in 1945, he said his heart was set on getting back into retailing. And even though he didn't have much experience, he was very confident that he could be successful on his own. So he started his retailing journey by opening a franchisee of a chain of variety stores called Ben Franklin. Helen wanted to stay in a town with a population of less than 10,000. So that really helped narrow down the search for Sam. And they settled on a town called Newport in Arkansas. He borrowed$20,000 from Helen's father, put in$5,000 of his own money, and bought a Ben Franklin franchisee from someone who wanted to unload the store and wasn't making money on it. The Ben Franklin folks had a short training program, but Sam was really on his own to figure out how to make the store work. A quote now from Helen Walton. It turned out there was a lot to learn about running a store. And of course, what really drove Sam was that competition across the street. John Dunham over at the Sterling store. Sam was always over there checking on John, always looking at his prices, looking at his displays, looking at what was going on. He was always looking for a way to do a better job. Sam took that money losing store and set himself a goal that in the next five years he would make his little Newport store to be the best, most profitable variety store in Arkansas. He says, 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 achieve it. If it doesn't work, you've had fun trying. At the store in Newport, Sam started to try out some of the ideas that later became the foundation of what he did at Walmart. For one, he loved experimenting. He was constantly innovating, looking for ideas on how to improve the business, looking for ways to reduce prices by finding offbeat suppliers or having promotions, bringing in popcorn or ice cream machines to attract more customers to his shop. By the end of those five years in Newport, he had met his goal. That little Ben Franklin store was turning$30,000 to$40,000 a year in profit. And it was the number one Ben Franklin store for sales or profit in the whole six state region. Just think about how amazing that is. And he was just 32 years old at the time. But unfortunately for him, his success, it turned out, had attracted a lot of attention. His landlord decided not to renew his lease at any price, knowing full well that he had nowhere else in town to move. He did offer to buy the franchise, so Sam was forced to sell his store, pack up everything, and move on. I'll quote here it really was like a nightmare. I had built the best variety store in the whole region, and now I was being kicked out of town. It didn't seem fair. 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. Helen and I started to look for a new town. Now at the age of 32, I was a full-fledged merchant. All I needed was a town. They settled on Bentonville and opened another Ben Franklin variety store franchise called Walton's Five and Dime. That store took off just like Newport had and turned into a good business right away. He says, I started looking around for store opportunities in other towns. Maybe it was just my itch to do more business, and maybe I didn't want all my eggs in one basket again. So he finds himself a store in Fayetteville. It's a town where there's already two popular stores that are challenging him, but that does not bother him. He loves to compete and faces competition head on, a theme that recurs throughout the book in his life. After Fayetteville, Sam just kept building. One store turned into a couple, then a small chain, and pretty soon the Walton family had a nice little network of variety stores across Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas. At the same time, Sam also learned how to fly. And this helped him tremendously to buy new stores, scout real estate, check out traffic patterns, and Kmart parking lots. Of course, he was always spying on competition. Um, but flying really enabled him to expand farther and farther. He says, during this 15 years time, we had become the largest independent variety store operator in the United States. All of the stores were still Ben Franklin franchisees, but he didn't own the name and he had to follow their rules, and Sam kept noticing limits. He wanted to lower prices, he wanted bigger stores, and he wanted to try new ideas. And the Ben Franklin folks weren't really into that. So right around this time, the concept of discounting was starting to take off. And true to his nature, Sam runs all over the country studying the concept. The concept of discounting was basically that by marking items lower, even though you made less per item, you sold more in volume and you made more in overall profit that way. He says, We really had only two choices left. Stay in the variety store business, which I knew was going to be hit hard by the discounting wave of the future, or open a discount store. So of course, I wasn't going to sit there and become a target. So Sam goes ahead and starts building a discount store in Rogers in 1962 in what would become the first Walmart. Not glamorous, not flashy, but it was his store and his rules. And the whole idea was simple: keep prices low, keep costs lean, and give customers a deal they cannot ignore. And interestingly enough, nobody wanted to gamble on this first Walmart. And he really put up about 95% of the dollars. And once they had opened a Walmart in Rogers, they stayed there for two years and then they opened two more stores. And after he got those first three stores running, he knew that it was going to work. But at the same time, his competition was starting to look at the smaller towns as well. So Sam Walton figured that he better roll the stores out as quickly as he could. And here's the quote In those days, word was starting to get out that a guy named Sam Walton had some interesting retailing ideas. So I drove down to see a Walmart opening. It was the worst retail store I had ever seen. Sam had brought a couple trucks of watermelons in and stacked them on the sidewalk. He had a donkey ride out in the parking lot. It was 115 degrees, and the watermelons began to pop, and the donkey began to do what donkeys do, meaning donkey crab. And it all mixed together and ran all over the parking lot. And when you went inside the store, the mess just continued having been tracked in all over the floor. He was a nice fellow, but I wrote him off. It was just terrible. From Sam Walton's perspective, the experiment he was doing was that even though his store was barely put together, it was highly promotional with merchandise for 20% less than the competition, and people would still come in despite the mess. And so Sam wasn't really trying to put low prices on just a few things. He was going for true discounting, and he was really putting the customer at the center of it all. And that is what set him apart. He says, We managed to sell our merchandise as low as we possibly could. And that kept us right side up for the first 10 years. The idea was simple. When customers thought of Walmart, they should think of low prices and satisfaction guaranteed. Somehow over the years, folks have gotten the impression that Walmart 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 44 when we opened our first Walmart in 1962, but that store was totally an overgrowth of everything we've been doing since Newport. And like most other overnight successes, it was about 20 years in the making. What was fascinating to me was that Sam Walton managed this massive expansion of his variety stores and Walmarts without any real support infrastructure. They didn't really have a real replenishment system, a proper distribution system, or a sophisticated buying program, or, you know, ideal merchandise assortment, back office support, or tie-ups with big suppliers like Procter and Gamble. But they grew anyway, figuring things out on the fly because Sam was obsessed with winning. And I think this quote from David Glass nails what made it work. He writes, Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from about everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day, bound and determined to improve something. Second, he's 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. Wow. Um just so amazing and really so true. And you see that in his book as well. Another thing that really set Walmart apart was where they chose to compete. Most of the discount chains back then were ignoring the little guys. You know, Kmart, which was another big um big department store chain, wouldn't touch a town with fewer than 50,000 people. Gibson's, which was another discount chain, was willing to go a bit smaller, you know, down to towns of about 10,000, 12,000. But Walmart, they were rolling into places with fewer than 5,000 people and finding they could still do business there. And to understand why that work, I think it's helpful to have a picture of what America looked like in the 1950s and 60s. The country was changing fast. You know, kids who had grown up on farms or in small towns and went off to fight in World War II or Korea had come home and they were looking for jobs, which were concentrated in city centers, but they didn't live in the cities. People were heading to the suburbs. Families were buying houses with backyards, buying cars. Most had at least one, many too, and the country had started building its interstate highway system as well, all of which drastically changed um the traditional ways in which Americans were accustomed to doing business. The downtowns of big cities started to lose population and business to the suburbs. Traditional diners and cafes suffered because of the new car-oriented chains like McDonald's and Burger King and the old variety stores, the likes of Ben Franklin's, were really just getting crushed by Kmart and some of the other big discounters. And culturally, which is also very interesting, with the introduction of the television and the new post-war car models, America was obsessed with being modern. Like everybody wanted to feel up to date. And that enabled the stores to thrive immediately. And that eventually made it possible to spread the idea pretty much all over the country. On their strategy to grow, Sam wrote, Maybe it was an accident, but the strategy wouldn't have worked at all if we hadn't come up with a method for implementing it. The method was to saturate a market area by spreading out, then filling in. While the big guys were leapfrogging from large city to large city, they became so spread out and so involved in real estate and zoning laws and city politics that they left huge pockets of business out there for us. Our growth strategy was born out of necessity, but at least we recognized it as a strategy pretty early on. We figured we had to build our stores so that our distribution centers or warehouses could take care of them, but also so the stores could be controlled. We wanted them within reach of our district managers and of ourselves here in Bentonville. So we would go as far as we could from a warehouse and put in a store. Then we would fill in the map of the territory, state by state, county seat by county seat, until we had saturated that market area. So while the big guys were leapfrogging from city to city, balked down in zoning fights in politics, Walmart was quietly filling in the gaps, dominating the little towns no one else wanted. And that's the playbook that eventually let them take over the whole country. One thing that really stood out to me about Sam Walton, and honestly surprised me, is that he wasn't a particularly organized guy. He admitted it himself. You know, he'd forget appointments as secretary would make, lose track of schedules, and he never really had a strict routine. Um, and I personally thought, you know, being organized would be very important to success, but in his case it wasn't. Here he says, being organized would really slow me down. In fact, it would probably render me helpless. He did, however, institutionalize a weekly morning meeting with his managers every Saturday. That he was a stickler for. Every week he would get his managers together to critique each other, talk about their mistakes, and find a way to correct them and move on. Sam, you know, himself, he was never really embarrassed to be wrong. He was happy to be corrected and then just shake it off and move to the next thing. And I think that humility, that willingness to learn without embarrassment, I think was one of his superpowers. Um, and speaking of learning, I wanted to spend some time talking about Sam's obsession with studying his competition. And this is, you know, a recurring theme and theme and one that I think was very influential in his success. He was unapologetic about checking out the competition and learning from his competitors. And here I quote Another way we tried to make up for our lack of experience and sophistication was to spend as much time as we could checking out the competition. It's something I did from the beginning and something I insisted all our managers do. I ran around the country studying the discounting concept, visiting every store and company headquarters I could find. I guess I've stolen, I actually prefer the word borrowed, as many ideas from Soul Price as anybody else in the business. Soul Price is a fascinating character in his own right. He was a pioneer of the warehouse store model. He started Price Club, which ultimately merged into Costco. And before that, he started a store called Fedmart, and Sam Waltz really liked that name. So you can see how he loves to borrow, as he likes to say, ideas. So he latched on right to Walmart. And he says, I probably visited more headquarters offices and 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 a lot of questions about pricing and distributions, and I learned a lot that way. There's just so many good stories in the book that I just can't cover here that are they're they're also really hilarious and then also inspirational. And it's another reason why you should pick up the book. But there's another funny story of a retailing consultant meeting Sam for the first time who says, When he meets you, he looks at you and he proceeds to extract every piece of information in your possession. He always makes little notes and he pushes on and on. After two and a half hours, he left, and I was totally drained. I wasn't sure what I had just met, but I was sure we would hear more from him. And I think this relentless curiosity and competitive spirit extended to his willingness to go head to head with the largest larger retailers. And he writes, I don't know what would have happened to Walmart if I had laid low and never stirred up the competition. My guess is that we would have remained a strictly regional operator. Then eventually I think we would have been forced to sell out to some national chain looking for a quick way to expand into the heartland. Maybe there would have been a hundred or hundred and fifty Walmarts on the street for a while, but today they would all have Kmart or Target signs in front of them. And I would have become a full-time bird hunter. We'll never know because we chose the other route. We decided that instead of avoiding our competent competitors or waiting for them to come to us, we would meet them head on. It was one of the smartest strategic decisions we ever made. In fact, if our story doesn't prove anything else about the free market system, it erases any doubt that spirited competition is good for business. Not just customers, but the companies which have to compete with one another, too. And here's another Quote from Bud Walton backing him up on this. Competition is very definitely what made Walmart from the very beginning. There's not an individual in these whole United States who has been in more retail stores, all types of retail stores too, not just discount stores, than Sam Walton. Make that all over the world. His mind is just so inquisitive when it comes to business. At the time that Sam Walton was getting into discounting, there was a whole lot of other people getting into discounting as well, but a lot of them didn't last. Sam's view on this was it all boils down to not taking care of their customers, not minding their stores, not having folks in their stores with good attitude. 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. Most of them could still be around today if they had followed some basic principles about running good stores. There are a lot of ways to build strong companies. They don't have to be done the Walmart way or my way or anybody else's way. But you do have to work at it. And somewhere along the line, the folks stopped short of setting the goals and paying the price that needed to be paid. I think that's true for just life in general. Um, I think a lot of times we forget to set goals and paying the price, which is hard work, that needs to be paid to get to our goals. He continues, at first we only butted heads with other regional discounters. We didn't compete directly with Kmart. To put things into perspective, compare Kmart and Walmart after they had both been on the street for 10 years. R50 plus Walmarts and 11 variety stores were doing about 80 million a year in sales compared to Kmart's 500 stores doing more than 3 billion a year. But 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 time wandering through their stores, talking to their people and trying to figure out how they did things. Here's a quote from Harry Cunningham, who was the founder of Kmart. From the time anybody noticed Sam, it was obvious he had adopted almost all of the original Kmart ideas. I always had great admiration for the way he implemented and later enlarged on those ideas. Much later on, when I retired, I tried to advise the company's management of just what a serious threat I thought he was. It wasn't until fairly recently that they took him seriously. I guess we really were a flea attacking an elephant, and the elephant didn't respond right away. That's Sam put in response to that. Here's another quote from Herb Fisher, who was the founder of another discounting chain. Kmart was opening so many stores. It was regarded as the Genghis Khan of the discounting business. Sam had always been clear about his attitude. Meet them head on. Competition will make us a better company. He's that way with everyone. Personally, he's such a fine, unassuming, quiet gentleman, but he's always picking your brain. And he always has a notebook or that tape recorder. He'll learn everything you know. But he shares his information freely with you in return. Now, of course, he's a competitor to James Way, but he wouldn't ever apologize for that. He thinks it makes us a better company, and he's right. Back to Sam. He says, We got so much better so quickly, it was hard to believe. 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. So hopefully, with all of those quotes, you get a sense of, you know, just how competitive he was. And it was known, you know, with his competitors as well that he really was always sort of keeping an eye on them and trying to figure out what they were up to and using their successful ideas in his own business. And he was unapologetic about it and really believed that that made him better and that also made their own companies better. Now by the late 1960s, Walmart was positioned for some serious growth. They had a winning retail concept, a core management team in place, and just enough systems to support the expansion. So in 1970, the company went public, partly to raise money for growth, but also to help pay off the debt Sam had accumulated. The public offering process itself reveals Sam's character as well. When he was considering investment banks, he didn't simply go with the default local option in Little Rock, Arkansas. Instead, he went to Wall Street in New York on a buying trip and he cold-called a leading investment bank at the time called White Weldon Co., introducing himself to the receptionist as Sam Walton of Walmart Stores and asking to speak with someone about taking his company public. Again, another example of him just being unapologetic and being curious and trying to do the best, trying to get the best investment bank. And even if that means just cold calling, right? He was willing to do that. So as Walmart continued to grow, Sam realized he had to get better organized and that Walmart needed systems, right? A merchandise assortment system, a replenishment system, and for all of this, a professional management team. So he began recruiting talent and not surprisingly, often from competitors, and he built a team that would take the company really to the next level. So between 1977 and 87, Walmart's average annual return was an incredible 46%. That is wild. And just for context, around 1977, Walmart's sales were about 5% of Kmart. Meanwhile, as Sam had predicted, retail was a hard business to survive in. Kmart was developing its own problems and really struggling to succeed and successfully execute a merger that they had done with a defunct chain. And the national economy was also weakening in the mid-70s. And the intense competition amongst the real merchants really began to drive the fast bucks, um, fast buck types out of the business. So I think while we're on that, I think it's also helpful to probably talk a little bit about his family life. Um, you know, I think the sense that you'd probably get so far, and Sam makes it pretty clear in the book, too, was he was a very hard-working man. You know, he lived and breathed retail, but he also had a family, a wife, and four kids, mind you. So from the book, I got the impression that Helen and Sam really tried to promote a sense of togetherness in the family. They had the kids involved in the business, in the stores, at home doing chores. They traveled together as a family a lot, and that helped instill that sense of togetherness. And I think that's you know, very encouraging for a lot of people that are trying to have successful careers and also at the same time have a fulfilling personal life and be there for their children. It seems like, you know, Sam really tried to do that as well. His kids say that even though he was away a lot, it didn't really ever feel like that he was absent. He tried his best to get them involved in the business and kept them informed right from the start. I think I think it's Jerry Jones who said the same thing too, which, you know, he he really has tried to involve his kids in the in the business. So, you know, he spends a lot of time with his family that way. Um he, you know, so yeah, so he really tried his best to get them involved in the business and kept them informed right from the start. Um, and I think it's it's a good solution for balancing your life, your calling in life with having enough time for your family by getting your family involved in the business. I think that's really smart. Um, so even as Walmart was growing into a retail powerhouse, Sam's journey wasn't, you know, wasn't smooth. I mean, you know, he obviously had that big episode when he opened his first door. Um, but at one point he decided to step back and let um Ron Mayer, one of his executives, take the reins of Walmart. But without getting into too much detail, you know, Sam realized he had retired prematurely. And so he decided to come back and he asked Ron to take a different role. And naturally, you know, getting demoted from CEO isn't exactly a pleasant experience. So, not shockingly, Ron departs the company along with a lot of his loyalists. And this was a major episode at Walmart, and it was not well received by Wall Street. But Sam, being his usual self, he was very optimistic. You know, he didn't dwell on the loss, but he saw it as an opportunity. And he says, as I said back when we lost the first Lee's in Newport, most setbacks can be turned into opportunities. And as things turned out, this setback presented us with one of the greatest opportunities in our company's history. Ever since David Glass and I had met at that awful Walmart opening, 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 that I had met. And rightly so, um, David Glass joined Walmart and became an incredible asset, eventually taking control of the company as CEO after Sam Walton. So by the late 70s now, Sam had brought in a new team after that mass exodus, and they were well positioned for the next decade of growth. He writes The more efficient Kmart, Target, Walmart, and some of the regionals became, and the more we bumped into each other in competitive situations, the more we were able to lower prices. Here's a quote from David Gloss. What we guard against around here is people saying, Let's think about it. We make a decision, then we act on it. And I love this, right? I think a lot of times it's so easy to just be like, oh, okay, let me think about it. And then you know, you never make a decision, and you sort of just like just stay in this moment of undecision and you know, not acting. So I think that's very good advice. So with this determination and decisiveness, in 1979, with about 230 stores, Walmart hit a billion dollars in sales for the first time. This is also when Walmart acquired Kuhn's big K stores, and from this point on, they just exploded. In the book, he talked a lot about experimenting, and there's a lot of fun stories about that. But he did that to find new ideas, and if he liked the experiment, he would double down on it or move on pretty fast if it failed. It was this fail fast, succeed faster mentality that led him to Sam's clubs. So he writes Sam's are big stores and warehouse type buildings aimed at small business owners and other customers who buy merchandise in bulk. Just like discounting, I'm sorry to say we can't take any of the credit for inventing the wholesale club concept. It was in the early 80s and we'd been in the discounting business for around 20 years. Only the efficient operators were still in business because prices and margins had been falling steadily the whole time. Suddenly we noticed a whole new class of sub-discounters undercutting our prices. Wholesalers with very low overhead who were selling at margins way below the 22% in the discount business, 5 to 7%. Especially since we knew that Sol Price, one of the original discount pioneers, was behind this idea. He had started this price club stores in 1976. So one day in 1983, I went to see Sol in San Diego. 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. So instead of ignoring the trend, he leaned in, he studied the model and adapted it to Walmart's approach. So just like with Walmart itself, he experimented, learned quickly, and scaled what worked. So that, you know, same pragmatic, no nonsense mindset is what showed up again when you read about his approach to philanthropy. And I think it may sound a little bit controversial, but you know, it makes a lot of sense. He didn't really dance around what he believed. He had clear principles and acted on them, even if they went against what most corporate leaders might feel comfortable saying out loud. And I really loved reading this section because he was so blunt. He was unapologetic about his views, and I really loved that brute honesty he brought because I think a lot of people in the corporate world may be shy to do what he did. He says, We are going to approach philanthropy with the same lack of reverence we gave to the traditional methods of the retail business when we started out there. Sam and Helen were dedicated to education causes and did support that in many ways. And he writes, Beyond that, we feel very strongly that Walmart really is not and should not be in the charity business. We don't believe in taking a lot of money out of Walmart's cash registers and giving it to charity for the simple reason that any debit has to be passed along to either our shareholders or our customers. I found this to be really a genuine and honest take on corporate philanthropy for Walmart and really trying to stay true to their stakeholders and to their business purposes. So just to wrap up, if you know, if you don't fully read the full book, you can jump to the last chapter where he summarizes the 10 rules that worked for him. And I won't read all of them, but there were two things that he said in that chapter that really struck a chord with me. The first thing he says is, one, I don't even have on my list is work hard. If you don't know that already or you're not willing to do it, you probably won't be going far enough to need my list anyway. I also believe in having goals and always setting them high. Without us really working towards them, um, or what you know, some people may even call wishful thinking. And I think this is such a good reminder throughout this book and through this last point that extraordinary things don't magically appear out of thin air, but come about with hard work. And a constant challenge for me, and I'm sure for others, is really to set those clear goals and work hard towards them. The second rule that I want to mention is he says, swim upstream, go the other way, ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was a town less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long. Sam Walton wrote this book while he was battling a form of terminal bone cancer, and I found his son Rob, his postscript in the book to be just so touching. He wrote, like every other challenge he encountered in his life, he met this one head on, full of optimism and ready to try new ways of conquering the problem. He took his medicine, but he never dwelled on either the illness or its potential cures. Rather, he seized the day. Once he decided to write his autobiography, he threw himself into this book project with the same focus and energy he applied to everything he did in life. I think it's really just so inspirational that someone who's nearing their end of life, has a terminal illness, can still find a way to be optimistic and find a way to keep themselves engaged with something that they think is very valuable and purposeful. And with that, it's a wrap for today's episode. Thank you for tuning in to listen. I really hope that you enjoyed the show and that you took something or a lot away. I know that I really did. And I would love to hear your comments if you have any feedback. And if you liked today's show, uh I would love if you shared it with someone you think would like it as well. The next episode will come out shortly and is going to be someone from a very different walk of life than both Reagan and Sam Walton, but incidentally, someone who was also from the American Midwest.